What Legal Remedies Are Available When Child Support Payments Are Missed in Texas?

If your child’s other parent is refusing to meet their support obligations, you do have options, and a Houston child support attorney can help you explore all of them. There are various legal remedies available to force parents to pay the support they legally owe, not to the child’s other parent, but to the child themselves.

What Legal Remedies Are Available When Child Support Payments Are Missed in Texas?

If you are the custodial parent, and the non-custodial parent is not paying support, you have essentially two options. The first is to go directly to the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) for enforcement, and this is often a good step to take because this office can access certain resources for enforcement that the courts cannot. The second option is to go to the courts, but this is usually something to pursue only if you cannot go through the OAG for some reason or there are other issues involved that require it. Be aware that it can be time-consuming and difficult to make your way through the Attorney General’s office, and it’s usually a good idea to have a child support attorney to assist you. When you work with an attorney, things go more smoothly and quickly.

If you are the custodial parent seeking court-ordered payments from the other parent, the first thing to understand is that child support is not owed to you. It is owed to the child. Bear this in mind not only as you speak to the court or to the Attorney General’s office, but also as you discuss the matter with the other parent. Keeping the focus on your child and not on yourself may help to resolve the situation. An attorney may also be able to help you talk to the other parent in a profitable manner that could resolve the issue. Sometimes one parent will withhold child support because they’re angry at the other parent and want to punish them in some way, without genuinely thinking about their moral and legal obligation to their child. Your attorney may be able negotiate effectively and provide a kind of buffer between you and the other parent.

But failing that, you will need to get government help to bring enforcement penalties down on the other parent if they simply refuse to meet their obligations.

Penalties for Failing to Pay Child Support

Forcing or Leveraging Payment

If a parent has a regular job, the government can do various things to claw that money away from the parent. The state can order a parent’s wages or salary to be garnished by their employer, for instance. This simply means the employer will be required to remove the child support payments and turn them over to the OAG or another agency to send on to the other parent, and the non-paying parent will never even see the money.

In addition, liens can be filed on various assets, including bank accounts, retirement plans, life insurance plans, insurance settlements, lottery winnings, and more. Liens can also be placed on real property such as a car or a house, and this would prevent the car or the house from being sold or refinanced until the lien is removed. The government can also report the non-payment to the credit bureaus, which will have an effect upon the non-paying parent’s credit and ability to get loans for a business or property purchase or even credit cards.

If a parent is not paying child support, Texas will also report this nonpayment to the United States Treasury Department. The IRS will then seize any tax refunds owed to that parent and give it directly to the Texas agency that is paying the custodial parent.

Interest Accumulation

When a parent does not pay, the obligation does not go away. Instead, the amount they are in arrears accumulates, and Texas applies a 6% interest penalty to this each year. 

Other Penalties

In some cases, it’s necessary to apply different kinds of penalties to push a parent to comply with the law and the ordered support. The parent’s driver’s license can be revoked, for example, or their hunting and fishing license can be removed. Federal law requires that a parent to be denied a new passport or the renewal of an old passport if they owe $2,500 or more in unpaid child support. The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles can also be instructed to deny them vehicle registration renewal.

Texas also has a hotline where anyone can call to provide tips about someone who is trying to evade their child support obligations. The number is 1-866-EVADERS, and if a parent owes more than $5,000 in child support and has an arrest warrant, their name, photo, and the amount they owe will be put up publicly on the webpage. This provides some social pressure and is also something that employers can look at as they vet potential employees.

Going to Court With Your Houston Child Support Attorney

A family law attorney can help you file an order to enforce payment with the Texas court system. This allows you to step things up and ask the court to hold that parent in contempt of court or even issue an arrest warrant for them. When there is no other way to get the money out of the parent, this can sometimes be a very effective way of going about it. An arrest warrant can lead to jail time of anywhere from six months to two years for each offense, depending on the circumstances. But again, the court will prefer that the parent be out of jail and able to work and provide for their child rather than be incarcerated, if that’s possible.

Penalties That Cannot Be Applied

It’s very important to know that visitation rights cannot be affected by child support. The right to spend time with a child and the responsibility to provide for that child are two separate things. The court always wants what is in the best interest of the child, and it will usually assume that maintaining a relationship with both parents is in the child’s best interest. This means that, even if a parent is not paying their required child support, this will almost never result in the revocation of their visitation rights.

For more on child support and for help in dealing with the Attorney General’s Office or in going to court, contact C.E. Schmidt & Associates, PLLC in Houston today.