The article below has got me boiling mad...I paid child support for 15 years, until I won custody of my son and had his mothers parental rights revoked/dissolved.
The mere fact that many women get no child support from deadbeat dads, and many men get no child support from deadbeat moms leads me to think, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
This is absolutely a "poor" tax, and it needs to be repealed. To tax a person who may be holding down 2 jobs to make ends meet, who relies on the child support to maybe pay for doctor's appointments for little Johnnie or Janie, $25.00 is a lot of money. It may very well be the difference between getting antibiotics or toughing out that upper respiratory infection.
Call or write your congressmen/women to have this tax (2006 federal Deficit Reduction Act.) on the innocent victims of divorce and/or unwed unions, the children, repealed.
READING, Pa. (AP) — Under a new policy, custodial parents in Pennsylvania are being charged $25 a year by the state to offset the cost of collecting child support.
"It's absolutely ridiculous," said Bonnie Hendricks, who lives near Reading and gets support for her two children. "This support is supposed to be for the kids."
The fee is the result of the 2006 federal Deficit Reduction Act. Federal officials gave states the option of paying the $25 fee on behalf of parents, collecting it from custodial parents or collecting it from noncustodial parents.
Most states, including Pennsylvania, have chosen to collect from custodial parents, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families.
"This is a fee we have to pay the federal government whether we collect it from parents or not," state Department of Public Welfare spokeswoman Stacey Witalec said. "From what we know in the number of noncustodial parents that we have in arrears, there's a higher probability that we can fulfill the requirement by collecting the fee from the custodial parent."
If the state were to pay the fee, it would cost taxpayers $2.6 million this year and $3.2 million next year.
Not all custodial parents must pay. Parents who have received cash assistance from the welfare department and those who receive $500 to $1,999 a year in child support are exempt.
"It's a weighty issue no matter which way you cut it," said Linda Faye Epes, Berks County's domestic relations director. "I think some people will realize it's the cost of doing business. It's a small cost to pay for the services provided on the county and state level."
Monday, August 4, 2008
Pa. Charges $25 Per Year to Collect Child Support
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2 comments:
I'm one of those parents trying to collect my child support and have been hit with this $25 fee. My ex-husband is STILL more than $15,000 in arrears after having back due support deducted for the past 2 yrs. I should mention thats after the $10,000 bill I got from the creeps at Blank Rome trying to collect what my daughter was due. Isn't that the job that the state says they are doing and have incurred all these fees for? I was so furious when I got the notice about the $25 that I called the office of the esteemed Congressman Jim Gerlach, who I generallly adore. I was hoping that he hadn't voted in favor of this crap. Sure enough, he was one of a only a handful of Rs who voted against this.
Socking it to custodial parents is really SHAMEFUL!
Bill, my girlfriend at work told me about this as she, like I used to be, is a custodial divorcee at the mercy of Domestic Relations.
I rememeber the switchover from the county run system to the new state centered system, and I must admit, the new system is better than the old horrible MCDRO. That being said, charging the custodial parent $25 bucks to insure that she (or he, as the case may be) will still be able to collect on that support is a slap in the face to all divorced custodial parents who are scraping by trying to provide a the basics of life for the child while the non-custodial parent typically enjoys one of two roles: deadbeat/absentee parent or "cool" parent, lavishing frivolous gifts on the child that the custodial parent can't afford.
Hey Rendell, that bottomless moneymaker legalized gambling can't throw off a couple of mill a year to help these folks out? As Bill would say, whiskey-tango-foxtrot.
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