Angela Naliborski was frustrated with the child-support system. The Belleville, Ill., woman hadn’t heard from her ex-husband in four years. He was supposed to pay her $240 a month to care for their two daughters, now ages 5 and 6.
The Illinois Department of Public Aid wanted her to do lots of legwork to get her ex to pay–something the certified nurse assistant had little time for.
“They said that unless I could find him, there was nothing they could do,” she said. So, she paid $600 to have a private attorney track him down. That resulted in a single child-support payment.
She turned to Child Support Network Inc. in December, and got a child-support check three months later. She receives $182 a month after the company takes its cut.
Parents like Naliborski, frustrated with the failure of state agencies and unable to afford costly attorneys, are increasingly contacting such collection companies to get some of the $50 billion owed them. Of course, all of the money won’t make it to them. The companies, which target non-welfare recipients and track down parents who are delinquent in court-ordered child-support payments, keep 30 to 50 percent of what they collect.
“I’m the court of last resort,” said Dan Jacobson, founder of the Phoenix-based Child Support Network. “If I don’t get you your money, you’re never going to get your money.”
The business of U.S. child-support collection is booming in the ’90s. “There is a whole group of people out there looking for options,” said Casey Hoffman, who says his Austin, Texas-based Child Support Enforcement Inc. gets about 30,000 calls a month.
Indeed, there is about $1.4 billion in unpaid child support in Illinois, and only about 12 percent of the parents ordered to pay child support here actually do, according to the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support Inc., a child-support advocacy group.
Hoffman said he expects the collection firms and private attorneys, which charge up to $200 an hour regardless of success, to account for about one-third of the work done in collecting overdue child support. The firms stand to expand in the market as welfare rolls are shortened and former recipients seek child-support payments to replace that income.
“For us, it appears to be an opportunity. That’s the upside for our business,” said Jacobson, who three years ago created his Child Support Network team.
The companies conduct extensive asset and background checks, so they have good ideas about the types of income deadbeat parents have before they even make contact.
“We have so much information that there’s no wiggle room. They’re not going to get one call every two years. We’re going to be in their face as often as necessary to get money to the table,” said Jacobson, who says his firm is successful 90 percent of the time in finding parents and gets about half of those to actually make payments. “The collector persuades them there’s no alternative to payment.”
Not even in death. If a parent dies before paying the child support owed, the company goes after the deceased’s estate.
Jacobson said firms like his provide a social good, helping to get money for people who might be confused about benefits that vary from state to state. “A lot of our clients don’t know they’re still eligible for child support,” he said. Interest on the tax-free unpaid money also varies.
Industry critics, though, say that the businesses are cashing in on children. That many such firms take large application fees and don’t deliver, require clients to sign exclusivity contracts and collect a fee even if a child-support agency does the bulk of the work on a case indicate the businesses are unethical, said Debbie Kline, of the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support Inc., a child-support advocacy group.
They’re unnecessary, as well, she said. “If a private collector can find someone and collect the money, so can the government child-support agency,” Kline said. “If you educate yourself, you can get that agency to do it.”
Her group offers information to parents about child-support enforcement and seminars on how to get agencies to work on cases. About 75 percent of the people who contact ACES end up getting child-support payments, she said.
Child Support Enforcement’s Hoffman said government agencies can’t effectively tackle the problem of delinquent child-support payments because they are not able to clear the backlog of cases. Hoffman, a former family law attorney, founded CSE in 1991 after five years at the helm of the Texas child-support system. His company, the oldest and largest child-support collection firm in the U.S., charges a $475 administrative fee and keeps 33 percent of the money it collects.
“We’re not uncomfortable about the fact that we charge for these services,” he said. “Sixty-seven percent of the money is better than 100 percent of nothing. I think I can claim the high ground when it come to supporting why women should have a choice . . . in coming to the private sector.”
Some men appreciate a choice, as well. Chicago firefighter Arnold Jackson said he got little help from the state when trying to get his ex-wife to make her monthly $250 support payments for their two daughters.
“I think they thought I was a joke. I’d be the only guy there,” he said.
Jackson hired CSE in 1993 and told the company his ex, who moved out of state following their 1985 divorce, was expecting money from a lawsuit settlement. Within a year, Jackson got a check for $12,000. He gets a support payment every two weeks.
“They did for me what I couldn’t do for myself without taking time off (from work) or taking the girls away from home to go down there for a court battle,” he said. “Probably the state would have gotten the same results and probably been a lot less expensive. But time is a big part when you’re raising kids by yourself. You need the money now rather than later.”
LOCATING HELP
– Child Support Network Inc., 800-398-0700, childnet@indirect.com, www.childsupport.com
– The Association for Children for Enforcement of Support Inc., 800-738-2237, dkaces@earthlink.net
– Child Support Enforcement Inc., 800-801-KIDS, www.supportkids.com
– KnowX (www.knowx.com) allows searches of public information, including millions of government records, on the Internet. The searches are 50 cents each during business hours and free all other times.
