If you are a parent who is ordered to receive child support following your divorce, you often have the awful task of tracking down a deadbeat parent.  This is never an easy process, and can involve tracking down the husband or the wife.  Neither gender is exempt from becoming a deadbeat parent.  Finding a deadbeat parent and working to ensure that they live up to their responsibility to the children who are involved is a trying task at the best of times.

 

It is important to note that if you do know where the other parent is and they are not paying child support, you are generally not allowed to withhold visitation until they start paying the support.  This could make your legal problems even worse with you being placed in contempt of court if your spouse takes you to court for withholding visitation.  Instead, you should never refuse visitation but continue to pursue child support enforcement from the courts.  

If you do not know where a parent is but need to locate them to enforce a child support order you have a few options...

The first is to allow the courts to enforce the order.  In this method you are allowing the courts to handle all matters of enforcement, including tracking your spouse down.  This is often a successful way of handling the problem, but can take months if not years because the courts move very slowly.  

Your next option is to search for your spouse yourself and then give the information to the enforcement office.  The problem with this is generally to be effective, you must devote a lot of time.  This time can usually be better spent with your children instead of tracking down the missing spouse.  While many people prefer this method because they want justice, weight it against the additional time you could spend with your children to determine if it is worth it.  

Another option you have is to hire a private enforcement company to track down and locate your spouse.  Theses companies are usually ruthless and manage to locate most deadbeat spouses within a few short weeks.  However, while it seems this is the best method to use, there are numerous drawbacks to this method.  First, with a private enforcement company your spouse cannot be arrested for failure to pay the support.  This means you are often losing a major punishment that is often effective for forcing parents to pay up.  Additionally, you are required to pay the fees associated with the enforcement action, so you must deduct their fees from the amount you are owed to decide if it is worth it financially.  

Last, one of the biggest reasons this method is not a good idea is if your spouse files bankruptcy typically, child support is not allowed to be discharged in any way.  However, if you have handed your case to a private enforcement company, it then becomes a debt that can be discharged in bankruptcy!  As you can imagine, this is a very good reason why jumping to a private enforcement company should be an absolute last resort.  Once you transfer, the case to a private company there is no turning back, so ensure you are positive you want them handling it. 

You do have another option that you can explore...  This method is also expensive, however can be effective above other methods, and does not cause you to move your case to a private enforcement agency.  You can hire a private investigator to search for your spouse.  Once they are located they would report back to you with their location, and any additional information needed.  You could then report this information to the courts so that they could pursue your spouse for the child support owed.

Your last option, which is also very slow, however the cheapest is to file your case at your local child support enforcement agency.  This would allow them to collect the support on your behalf and forward payments to you.  If your spouse has a job, then occasional scans for their social security number on employment records would enable them to file a wage withholding order with the employer of your spouse.  This would enable you to receive the money you were owed, however because the child support enforcement agencies also service non-married couples they have a huge caseload and it can take weeks or even months before your case gets any attention.