Most Recent Statistics Show Problems with Unpaid Child Support

According to information from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there were nearly 15.6 million open child support cases in the United States as of 2013, the most recent year for which there’s complete data available. In those cases, approximately 17 million children needed intervention from the state to get one of their parents to pay the ordered amount of child support.

In those cases, states were only successful in collecting child support 60 percent of the time. That means that more than 6.7 million children did not receive any support from the non-custodial parent in 2013.

In most cases, it is the father that fails to pay up, which can cause some severe problems for single mothers, as child support payments on average consist of 39 percent of their total household income. These child support payments create a 25 percent reduction in the poverty rate of single mothers. So when fathers fail to make their child support payments, the chance that the mother and her children will be forced to live in conditions of poverty drastically increases.

In total, more than $26 billion in child support was distributed in 2013. When you consider that this is only 60 percent of what the total number should have been, that means more than $17 billion in child support went unpaid that year.

When your former spouse fails to make child support payments, you do have the ability to appeal to the court for enforcement. Meet with the dedicated Long Island child support lawyers at Jakubowski, Robertson, Maffei, Goldsmith & Tartaglia to learn more.