Congress Tags Child Support as Luxury Income; Collection System an Economic Failure

Promoting Adoption

In 1993, John McCain and his wife, Cindy, adopted a little girl from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh. She has been a blessing to the McCain family and helped make adoption advocacy a personal issue for the Senator.

The McCain family experience is not unique; millions of families have had their lives transformed by the adoption of a child. As president, motivated by his personal experience, John McCain will seek ways to promote adoption as a first option for women struggling with a crisis pregnancy. In the past, he cosponsored legislation to prohibit discrimination against families with adopted children, to provide adoption education, and to permit tax deductions for qualified adoption expenses, as well as to remove barriers to interracial and inter-ethnic adoptions.

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/issues/95b18512-d5b6-456e-90a2-12028d71df58.htm

actually, most government collections aren’t outsourced much. Maryland is most likely a rigged ‘outsourcing’ like they did with the tobacco settlement case which got handed over to Peter Angelos for a $1B commission. It’s been a fairly open secret that Angelos’ firm owns large parts of the Maryland state legislature which is how got the tobacco deal outsourcing (even though Maryland could have done it in-house since the work was mostly already done) as well as killing off legislation which would exempt certain industries from various tort claims and medical malpractice claims.

I’ll admit that my contact with this industry is mostly about 5 years old since I stopped bothering with that sector somewhere around then. But other than one program with the IRS I’ve not heard of any big movement nationwide.

Any mediocre collection agency could collect more money for any city on parking tickets alone that the city makes by just issuing tickets and waiting until somebody gets arrested before they enforce the tickets and exact payment.

The bigger the government agency the harder it is to get any outside help. The politicians (which are mostly lefties) don’t want to outsource anything which isn’t unionized and there are no union collection agencies or finance companies. And those politicians can’t imagine how bad it would look if some tiny company dramatically increased the collection rates and the government schlubs who were supposed to be doing the job were made to look bad. And heaven help them if that ‘private contractor’ did something wrong and somebody wanted to sue.

I watched the District Attorney of Los Angeles County (second largest county in the US) file liens against bank accounts of two individuals who were NOT the subject of the child support orders he was seeking to enforce. I could tell them were the right name/wrong guy immediately (especially since in both cases the correct guy was black and the guy who got targetted was white) with about $0.35 worth of data. Los Angeles County got sued but good and deserved it. But it only took one of the LA County Commissioners to prevent me from even taking on the worst cases and getting them money from ‘deadbeat dads’ just as test cases and getting them the money they claimed was due.

Only Dallas County in TX ever admitted it was smart enough to have somebody do it for them. But even then they could only do it for certain types of cases.

And at the same time, Bill Clinton in 1996 issued an executive order allowing the Dept of Treasury via the Secret Service to search the accounts of all US banks to find any accounts held under the name or SSN of any person on the list of ‘deadbeat dads’ and report those accounts to Treasury (who would presumably then report it to the state where the deadbeat was being sought). In every small bank in America, they either had to search all their accounts for these tens and tens of thousands of names and SSNs OR (and this is the fun part) the banks would have to turn over ledgers of ALL account holders identities to Treasury so Treasury could search the records themselves. No mention of the 4th Amendment by Janet Reno at the time and most GOP members of Congress knew nothing about this.

I watched Downey Savings Bank in So. California send over big boxes of paper which contained the identities and account numbers of thousands of their active accounts because they lacked the funds and/or time to search all their files against this massive list (to which there is no compatible system in most banks to do this since it’s not a normal task).

So, in short, it’s a goat f@%*. Governments don’t know how to collect money or find it when debtors try to hide it. And most government entities simply don’t reallly even want to try. It is tragic and/or comical. But it is the absolute fastest way to solve budget problems which doesn’t require raising taxes. It works for hospitals and other quasi-public agencies as well. Typically, the ‘receivables’ department is one person who answers the phone and mails out statements

I think you miss the point. You can't squeeze blood from turnips. It's just a racket. Private collection agencies do not have a better collections record than when the whole thing remains in the hands of government computers. In fact, the computers at the private child support collection agencies are government computers - paid for by your tax dollars. A large share of the income that keeps the private industry afloat is federal money passed through states as a contract fee.

Private child support collection agencies are just a more expensive version of government agencies; taking large fees and commissions right out of the child support payments that are made. Neither the state agencies nor the private collection agencies provide any real services. They just wait for payments and take the credit.

Texas was recently slapped for forcing all cases through private agencies - requiring parents to pay unnecessary fees and commissions to companies. Now - isn't it pretty obvious there's more than a tad of corruption involved in the private child support corruption industry.

I hope the article makes it perfectly clear. It benefits an entirely unnecessary government bureacracy - that's all.

Good article, Roger. I agree in principle that this tax is another government bureaucracy but not an unnecessary one. This is the first step in giving greedy and uncaring women a taste of the kind of government injustice fathers have been eating for the last 25 years. Unfortunately we can't grandfather it back to make the past crowd of greedy and uncaring female recipients of those gross injustices pay up in "arrears" (the government just loves to create false arrears for men).

What I see here is the first hint of what I've long been hoping for--that is, the government deciding that what's good for the goose is sauce for the gander. May this be just the beginning of females getting a good and long taste of how it is to have their entire lives being regulated (by financial means) by the government the way men (and the women who love them) have been treated for the last 25 years. After all this is the same bunch of liberated gals who wanted "equality." Well let them get it good and hard.

Let the feminists crow about how "wrong" this is. In the long haul it won't matter. If the government sees a profit for and a way to make a bigger government by taxing CS they will continue to do it and increase it and to hell with what the sensible shoe wearing feminist gang say. It's money that matters first and foremost in politics. I see this luxury tax (and with the amounts women receive in CS it IS a luxury they receive) as a blow for true equality and I applaud it.

Corruption. Pretty much exclusively.

I’m talking about REAL outsourcing. What you are describing is just more bureaucracy and boondoggling.

If you handed me a cell phone and a stack of dead files, I could out collect any government agency in the country myself. It’s just brain damagingly simple. I don’t take cases unless they are already resisting the agencies usual collection routines and I only get paid a percentage of what I bring in ABOVE the prior collection rate. There is no way for the state/city/county to lose on this unless I go out and break lots of laws and get them sued repeatedly. (which they usually end up doing themselves).

It reminds me of the Social Security debate. Bush says ‘private account’ and the lefties say ‘privatization’. And we’re not talking about the same thing cuz one makes sense and the other is a non-starter.

So apparently, lots of states (who already can share info between child support divisions under Fed law) decided to pay off friends instead of doing the job themselves.

I guess my mistake back in the 1990s in trying to get those agencies to outsource their collection to me was that I wasn’t offering to screw the public, fail to improve their performance and then offer some kickbacks to politicians.

If you handed me a cell phone and a stack of dead files, I could out collect any government agency in the country myself.

No, you couldn't. Payment rates are primarily a function of the ability of people to pay. You can't squeeze blood from turnips any more than the others who've tried.

Eliminating bureacracy and middle-men is quite simple however. Just eliminate them. No point at all adding you back into the mix with a claim that you're a different kind of middle man.

Payment / order ratios today are no different than they were before the collection program began. That's because, for the most part, people who can pay, do pay. Simple as that.

Returning child support to the private sphere, allowing parents to make their payments directly - i.e. by sending a check to the other parent or through automatic payment set up in one's private bank account voluntarily (except in welfare cases) - gets exactly the same result but without the government expense.

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