The punitive nature of the child support system must be changed. Our legal and social traditions in this country have never condemned procreation nor has it sought to punish the children who are the product of procreation. When a support agent abuses their authority and coerces a respondent to pay excessive support, the ensuing failure only harms the children. The taxpayers are then harmed by having to pay support agents, lawyers, law enforcement, and judges to prosecute civil non-support cases. The choices to correct course are 1) do nothing and hope things get better, or 2) fix the support system and make it truly objective.
Currently, child support awards are based on the relative income of both parents that calculates an “equitable share” for each parent, and the parent who earns more end up paying.29 This creates a pseudo alimony situation where those who are not eligible or who don’t want to pay for alimony proceedings, get just that. This is a legal attempt to place the custodial parent in an economic position that they were in before separation and give them a windfall profit. But if child support is truly for the support of a child, then why should either parent have to pay anything for joint custody?
Child support should be an objective calculation used to support and care for a child, in the event that a non-custodial, natural parent cannot share custody. Child support awards need to be simplified by making them objective though data unrelated to the parents, and removed from the passion of the moment. This article argues that child support should be removed from the judicial system entirely and placed with the North Carolina State Department of Revenue.
The Court system does some things very well such as logically redressing grievances and problems that have already occurred in society or between parties. However, we do not punish
people for what they may do, but for what they have done or failed to do. Our judicial system is
very bad at other functions however, such as efficiency and economics. There are other agencies of the government that are far more suited to deal with this type of problem.
Child support is for a child, not to support mom. There is no better example of this than when we review child support awarded under the North Carolina Child Support Worksheet – B for Joint Custody30 where one parent is obligated to pay the other support for a child that they are spending equal amounts of time with, i.e. 182.5 days each. This extra support nearly always goes to the mother but always to the parent who earns less than the other.
The problem with using the judicial system for dealing with a future economic issue is that in a custody case, there is a great deal of passion and subjective application of the law.
Because of the objective intent behind the need for monitory child support, the subjective factors and passions must be removed from the process to eliminate or at least minimize subjective abuses. The mantra of, “it’s all for the children…” was the motivation behind the 1974 enactment of Title IV-D.31 Simply because we subjectively “feel” that making someone pay more than what is objectively needed to support a child is somehow helping them, this ideology opens the system up to more and more abuse.
