Making non-custodial parent location efforts more effective

It’s not overstating 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 are helping provide children in challenging family situations 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 obtain 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 is locating non-custodial 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’re often residing far from their children.

As a result, NCPs can be elusive; if child support services agencies are successful in tracking down NCPs, they can improve the financial stability of custodial parents and their children. Just as importantly, this work can help these other parents build closer relationships with their children. Successful location efforts can also enhance the integrity and accountability of their state’s child support program.

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 tracking down NCPs particularly challenging is that it’s really a set of challenges. 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 the problem of 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. Since incarceration impacts child support, knowing when the NCP is in custody and when the individual’s incarceration status changes is crucial information.

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 in order 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. By finding an NCP, agencies can help boost the chances that the child can establish and maintain a relationship with both parents. 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

With the work of finding NCPs becoming more complicated and urgent — and with staffing often insufficient to handle that complexity and urgency — child support agencies are seeking digital technology tools that can help them better engage best practices of accuracy and speed into their work. Digital technology also can boost collaboration between child support agencies and law enforcement, which can be critical to finding an NCP.

For instance, a well-crafted tool should be able to access comprehensive databases and records across numerous states and regions, implementing advanced search and investigation capabilities. It also should incorporate data-driven insights and analytics to track down and investigate individuals more quickly and accurately. Ideally, these capabilities should all be available on a single platform. Having to jump from software to software can bog down the investigation process — and render the results less trustworthy.

Because of the ever-growing importance of technology in agency professionals’ work, best practices also include thorough training and education for staff on making the best use of digital tools. In addition, agencies should ascertain that vendors providing the NCP location technology conduct regular data updates and maintenance.

To get a sense of how digital technology can boost child support agency performance in locating NCPs, take as an example Thomson Reuters CLEAR for Child and Family Services, a cloud-based investigation platform that accesses and analyzes thousands of state and federal public records datasets. The investigation software embedded in CLEAR delivers comprehensive search results within a single platform. This technology allows agency professionals to make more confident decisions about an NCP’s location and that individual’s ability to pay court-ordered support.

To locate NCPs, child support agencies need access to numerous data sources and tools that can search through those databases quickly and reliably. CLEAR’s capabilities include technology for license plate data, including radius and linked search for vehicle-related inquiries and actionable insights using map searching and visualizations. The tool also provides users with real-time arrest records and incarceration status data since, sad to say, many NCPs become ensnarled in legal trouble. It also can be customized to generate automated alerts for arrests or releases for individuals that child support agencies have under investigation.

In addition, the platform’s key product features include tools that can help state child support agencies engage best practices in their NCP location workloads. These capabilities include linked searching, an intuitive interface for streamlined investigations, and batch delivery for searching multiple individuals or businesses at the same time. The platform also gives professionals the ability to search for the NCP in surrounding states and even nationally.

CLEAR also offers tools that are particularly beneficial to child support professionals. A recently launched example is Alert Center, which provides investigators with automated alerts regarding open NCP cases. These alerts can include updates from public records on the address, phone numbers, professional licenses, and incarceration status of the NCP under investigation.

Case studies and success stories

Child support professionals need to know that their investigation software tools can be relied upon to help them streamline processes, improve collaboration between agencies, and lead to financial stability for families. They need digital solutions that consistently provide accurate location information, 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.

Using the CLEAR platform, the officer on the other end of the line discovered that the individual had an adult son living in the same town. The son owned a distinctive yellow truck with personalized license plates. She read the information over the phone to the federal agents, who quickly found the son’s house and identified his vehicle. It turned out that the father was indeed living there, and the agents were able to arrest him for gross child neglect. Thanks to the state agency’s ability to respond rapidly with accurate information, the custodial parent and the children were able to get the $63,000 the father owed them — and that they urgently needed.

In another instance, a Wisconsin county child support agency was having trouble finding an NCP who was more than a year in arrears making court-ordered child support. Mail sent to the NCP’s last-known address was being returned, and state databases showed no records of that individual having a job. Conducting a search via CLEAR, the state case worker found that the last-known residence was indeed owned by the missing parent, who was using a second address to receive tax bills by mail. The CLEAR-powered investigation also revealed that the NCP was operating two income-producing businesses. The county agency used this information to contact the NCP and compel that individual to resume child support payments.

Conclusion

State child support agencies carry out a profoundly important task. By locating often hard-to-find NCPs and enforcing their court-ordered support payments, they’re helping to improve the lives of families throughout the country.

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 making use of future-oriented solutions, child support agencies can help ensure a better future for millions of kids — and, thus, for all of us.

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