Child Support Rules

As you would expect, Texas has very well settled rules about child support and how it gets collected. These rules are enforced by the courts, and the parent with custody of the child can either hire a private agency (or attorney) to seek child support, or can receive assistance from the Texas Attorney General's office. If the State has provided assistance to the child, then the Attorney General will automatically seek reimbursement from the parent who is not paying child support. This can happen even many years after the birth of a child. I once represented a man who was unpleasantly surprised to find that the State had sued him for reimbursement of welfare benefits paid to support a child he fathered while a junior in high school. The man had long since lost contact with the mother, and received quite a shock when the Attorney General of the State of Texas sued him to recover over $45,000.00 in past due child support payments, with interest and court costs.

One of the first issues in many cases is establishing who the father of the child is. If the man identified by the mother denies fathering the child, or if the mother is unsure of who the father is, the State can and will obtain blood tests on the possible fathers to determine paternity - even if the father is still in school or if he lives in another state. A court will then enter a formal judgment declaring a specific individual to be the father. Nor does it matter whether the pregnancy was unplanned. Texas law says that both parents are responsible for supporting their children. This means that once the court determines the identity of the biological father, the man must pay to help support his child.

The amount of child support is almost always determined by the amount of money that the parent who does not have custody of the child makes. Texas law provides a sliding scale of percentages of income that the non-custodial parent must pay, and Texas courts rarely stray from this scale. It is: 20% of net income for support of one child, 25% for support of two children, 30% for support of three children, 35% for support of four children, and 40% for five or more children. Child support obligations continue until the child is at least 18 years old, and possibly longer, depending on factors like whether the child is still in school or college when he or she reaches the age of eighteen. Although courts rarely stray from the above guidelines, Texas law does allow them to do so in specific and limited circumstances.

The court which orders the child support can modify its orders at any time, and will do so if there has been a significant change in the non-custodial parent's ability to pay. An increase in earnings may result in an order requiring payment of more child support, for example, while the loss of a job or other decrease in income might decrease the amount of child support owed.

If non-custodial parents do not pay child support, they are subject to enforcement measures to collect regular and past-due payments. The Child Support Division uses many techniques to enforce child support orders, including:

• requiring employers to deduct court-ordered child support from the non-custodial parent's paycheck through wage withholding;
• intercepting federal income tax refund checks, lottery winnings, or other money that may be due from state or federal sources;
• filing liens against his or her property or other assets; and
• seeking to have driver's, professional, and hunting and fishing licenses suspended

There are, by all accounts, a lot of deadbeat dads (and some deadbeat moms) out there. With the arsenal of methods which now exist to force payment of child support, and the growing cross-referencing of records both within Texas and out of state, persistence by the non-custodial parent in seeking child support will almost always pay off eventually - unless, of course, the non-custodial parent simply does not have the means to pay.

John Polewski is a board certified attorney with offices in DeSoto and Midlothian