The Impact of Percentage-Expressed Child Support Orders on Payments

Abstract

The Institute for Research on Poverty provided support for this research; data were gathered through a contract with the Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services. Opinions expressed are our own and not necessarily those of the sponsoring institutions. We would like to thank Dan Meyer for assistance with this analysis. AbstractThis article examines the impacts on child support payments of explicitly indexing orders to noncustodial parents' incomes by expressing orders as a percentage of income rather than as a fixed sum. We use data collected from twenty-one counties in Wisconsin and merged with annual income data from the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. We find that payments increase much faster with percentage-expressed than with fixed-sum orders, after controlling for differences between cases which receive the two award types. Collections on behalf of percentage-expressed orders increase because of large increases over time in the amount of the obligation; in comparison, fixed-sum obligations are extremely stable. Further gains may be possible by improving the capacity of the courts to monitor compliance via access to current income information.

A Reassessment of Involuntary Allotment Order (IAO) Rates in the Malaysian Armed Forces

“…According to Bartfeld & Garfinkel (1996), the percentage of deduction from the payee's income was introduced because the previous approach, which was based on the court assessment method based on a list of necessities, was effective. This is because the decision to establish the rate varied between cases even if it was based on the same facts of the case, which did not meet the current cost of living.…”