Human Services

Child Support Enforcement Grants

Statewide Outcome(s):

Child Support Enforcement Grants supports the following statewide outcome(s).

Strong and stable families and communities.

Context:

Every child needs financial and emotional support, and every child has the right to support from both parents. Minnesota’s child support program benefits children by enforcing parental responsibility for their support. According to Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support: 2009, a report released by the U.S. Census Bureau in December 2011, Americans who pay child support provide an average of $430 per month to custodial parents of those children. Child support represents a high proportion of income for lower income custodial parents. Among custodial parents below the­ poverty level who received the full amount of ordered pay­ments in 2009, child support represented an average of 62.6 percent of their annual individual income. Conversly, among custodial parents of all income levels, child support payments received represented 16.1 percent of their average annual individual income in 2009. In 2010, 26.8 percent of all custodial parents sought government assistance in collecting child support.

Child Support Enforcement Grants help strengthen families by providing concrete financial supports. Child Support is an important component to help families be self-sufficient. Child support enforcement is administered by counties acting under state direction and supervision. These grants assure that assistance in obtaining basic support, medical support and child care support is available to children through locating parents, establishing paternity and support obligations. Without these supports, many custodial families would not have the financial resources to become self-sufficient. Additional grants provide federal funding to improve non-custodial parents’ access to their children. Funding is a mix of federal grants, state general fund and fees.

County and state child support offices provide services to more than 395,000 custodial and non-custodial parents and their 268,000 children. In 2011, the child support program collected and disbursed $602 million in child support. Access and visitation funds served 347 families in FY 2011.

Strategies:

Working with counties and tribes, the following activities help to support and stabilize families:

·         Establish paternity: Establish legal parentage through genetic testing, Recognition of Parentage or other means;

·         Establish and modify court orders: Establish court orders for child support, medical support and child care support, based on statutory guidelines;

·         Enforce court orders: Assure payment of court-ordered support through remedies established in federal regulation and state law, such as income withholding, driver’s license suspension, and passport denial; and

·         Collect and disburse child support payments: Collect and process payments from employers, parents, counties and other states, credit support obligations and issue support funds to families.

Results:

The federal government funds the child support program at the state level in part through performance incentives. Incentives are calculated by measuring the state program’s performance in core program activities: paternity establishment, order establishment, collection of current support and collection of arrears (past due support). States are ranked by their scores on the performance measures. Minnesota ranks among the top five states on the collections measures, and among the top 20 on paternity and order establishment measures.

Performance Measures Notes:

1      Measurements compare 2010 data (Previous) to 2011 data (Current). Each measurement has a threshold of 80 percent. This represents the point at which states begin earning and maximizing federal incentives.

2      Federal measures may be found in the 2011 Minnesota Child Support Performance Report, https://edocs.dhs.state.mn.us/lfserver/Public/DHS-4252L-ENG.