It’s not overstating it to say that the work of child support services professionals is crucial to our country’s future. Whether they serve as executives of state child support agencies, program managers, or caseworkers, these professionals help provide children in challenging family situations with a measure of stability as they grow into maturity.
State agencies operate under the national child support program, overseen by the Office of Child Support Services (OCSS) within the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The OCSS child support program ensures that children receive court-ordered financial support by locating absent parents, establishing support obligations, and enforcing those obligations. A related entity, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, collaborates with states, tribes, local offices, employers, nonprofit groups, and other governmental offices to help them secure the support needed for custodial families.
The OCSS can point to significant success in achieving those goals. In the fiscal year 2022, the federal child support program served 12.8 million children — nearly one in five U.S. kids. It collected $30.5 billion in child support payments, 96% of which went to custodial families, with the remainder used to reimburse public assistance programs. These positive results couldn’t have been achieved without the dedication and hard work of state child support agencies nationwide.
However, as any child support services professional knows, this kind of success requires facing numerous challenges. One of the most daunting tasks is locating noncustodial parents (NCPs). While NCPs aren’t their children’s primary caregivers, they are responsible for contributing financially to their upbringing. But for one reason or another, many of them can’t or don’t fulfill that responsibility. What’s more, they often reside far from their children.
As a result, noncustodial parents may be difficult to locate. When agencies can re establish contact and obtain accurate information, they can better support custodial parents and their children.
This white paper will explore the best practices that child support professionals can employ to locate NCPs effectively, improve enforcement efforts, and create better outcomes for custodial parents and the children they’re raising. With the challenges they face becoming more complicated, these professionals are seeking the most innovative technology tools to boost their effectiveness and efficiency — tools that can best address those specific challenges.
Challenges in locating non-custodial parents
What makes noncustodial parent location particularly challenging is that it often involves multiple, overlapping factors. For instance, there often are jurisdictional and related legal issues. If both the custodial parent and the NCP reside in the same state, enforcing the NCP’s court-ordered child support payments is relatively straightforward. If the two parents live in different states, the situation can be more complex.
Each state determines which court within a state has jurisdiction to consider the issue of child support. While most states are open to cooperating with the custodial parent’s home states in enforcing the NCP’s child support obligations, the state where the NCP resides can relitigate that obligation and modify how much the NCP needs to pay. By and large, the bigger issue for home-state child support agencies is ready access to interstate databases and cross-state collaboration to help locate NCPs.
Another ongoing challenge for nearly all government agencies, including those overseeing child support services, is limited resources. State governments are under continual pressure to run their agencies as leanly as possible. Even if a state child support agency has funds to hire additional staff, finding qualified employees is often not easy.
But perhaps the most significant challenge — interwoven with the other two — is access to accurate and up-to-date location information. Again, NCPs are often challenging to find. It’s not unusual for them to frequently change residences; sometimes that residence is jail or prison. In determining an NCP’s ability to pay, child support agencies must work within the guidelines of the federal Flexibility, Efficiency, and Modernization in Child Support Enforcement Programs Final Rule. The Final Rule states that incarceration is considered involuntary unemployment.
If the NCP is incarcerated for at least 90 days — in some states — to 180 days in the majority of states, child support is terminated. Upon release, the NCP is not required to make up payments missed while behind bars. Because incarceration can affect child support obligations, accurate and timely information about custody status is an important consideration for case management.
In sum, child support professionals not only need the most current and accurate data to manage their agency’s casework, but they also need it quickly to resolve their cases and ease children’s urgent financial needs.
Benefits of effectively locating non-custodial parents
The efforts of state child support professionals in locating NCPs play a vital role in their agency’s functioning — and, of course, the welfare of their state’s children and families. Here are the key benefits of conducting this essential work effectively:
- Financial assistance. The most essential benefit, of course, is the custodial family’s financial stability. By locating the NCP, child support agencies can ensure that the children receive the financial assistance they are entitled to, helping their families meet their basic needs and improving their overall well-being.
- Child support. Locating the NCP is also necessary for enforcing legal obligations related to child support. It allows child support agencies to initiate or modify child support orders, calculate appropriate support amounts based on the NCP's income, and ensure compliance with court orders.
- Medical care. Locating the NCP also can provide access to necessary medical information, such as family medical history, which can be crucial for the child's healthcare needs. This information can enable healthcare providers to make informed decisions and provide appropriate medical care.
- Emotional support. When agencies can locate and contact an NCP, it may support opportunities for appropriate parental involvement, depending on the circumstances of each case. Assuming that the NCP is willing and able to provide not only financial support but also emotional support, having such a relationship can strengthen the child’s overall well-being and sense of identity.
- Child safety. In cases where there are concerns about the child's safety or welfare, finding and contacting the NCP can be critical. It can enable child protection agencies to assess the situation and intervene if necessary to ensure that the child is safe and protected.
- Assistance programs. Effective NCP location protocols are also crucial for the maintenance of government assistance programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The protocols can allow these programs to recover public funds spent on assistance to the custodial parent and child.
To fulfill these laudable goals, state child support agencies need to incorporate current best practices into their investigation and location processes.
Best practices for effective location efforts
As NCP location work becomes more complex — and staffing resources remain limited — child support agencies continue to look for ways to support accuracy, consistency, and efficiency within their established workflows. Technology can play a role in helping agencies organize information, support collaboration with partner organizations, and apply best practices while relying on professional judgment and existing policies.
Well-designed tools can help agencies access relevant public records across jurisdictions, consolidate information from multiple sources, and reduce the need to navigate between disconnected systems. Bringing information together in a single interface can support documentation and case review without replacing human oversight or professional judgment.
Because technology is only as effective as its implementation, best practices also include training staff on appropriate use of digital tools and confirming that vendors maintain current, well-governed data sources through regular updates and maintenance.
One example of a platform used by child support agencies is Thomson Reuters CLEAR for Child and Family Services, a cloud-based public records platform designed to help professionals organize and review information from lawful data sources. CLEAR brings together search results within a single system to support case documentation and informed review, while leaving interpretation and enforcement decisions to agency staff.
To support this work, agencies may use a range of public records tools to review address, employment, or other relevant information as permitted by policy. In some jurisdictions, agencies may also have access to vehicle-related public records data as an optional, separately purchased resource. This data reflects ad hoc historical license plate detections only, and does not include personal information about vehicle owners or real time tracking. Any such data should be used solely as a supplemental reference, reviewed alongside other documentation, and should never be the sole basis for a case decision.
Additional platform features — such as linked searching, batch research for multiple individuals, and the ability to review information across state lines — can help agencies manage larger caseloads more efficiently while maintaining consistent processes.
CLEAR also offers optional alerting functionality, such as Alert Center, which can help staff stay informed on relevant public record updates associated with open cases, depending on agency policy and permitted use. These alerts may reference changes in contact information or other public record indicators and are intended to support awareness rather than monitoring.
Case studies and success stories
Child support professionals need investigative software tools that help them streamline processes, improve collaboration between agencies, and support financial stability for families. They need digital solutions that provide access to aggregated location information from multiple sources, help boost their child support enforcement efforts, and, ultimately, close cases.
Here’s a recent case that put the Thomson Reuters investigative tool to the test. An NCP in the Upper Midwest owed $63,000 in back child support, but he no longer lived in the state where the custodial family resided. Federal investigators found an address for him, but the man was no longer living there when they arrived. The agents called an officer from the originating state to find out whether any other information was available that might help them locate the parent. Since they were out in the field, they needed that information quickly — while they were still on the phone.
In one case, a state child support agency assisted federal partners by sharing consolidated public records information that helped reestablish the location of a noncustodial parent with significant unpaid child support obligations. This coordination ultimately supported enforcement action and recovery of funds for the custodial family.
In another case, a county agency was able to use public records research to obtain additional context relevant to a noncustodial parent’s financial circumstances, which supported efforts to reengage the individual and resume support payments.
Conclusion
State child support agencies carry out a profoundly important task. By maintaining accurate information and applying consistent, well-documented processes, child support agencies can support families, uphold program integrity, and carry out their responsibilities effectively.
Fulfilling that mission requires these agencies to leverage technological advances for improved outcomes. Child support agency professionals seeking to gain a deeper understanding of how digital tools can boost the effectiveness of their NCP location work can start by requesting a free demo of CLEAR for Child and Family Services and then learning more about Alert Center. By using future-oriented solutions, child support agencies can help ensure a better future for millions of kids — and, thus, for all of us.
