Creative Enforcement of Child Support?

The State of Texas has come up with some creative ways to try to get child support payments. Some of those are to revoke driver’s licenses, professional licenses, intercept tax refunds, etc. Now the State has come up with a new method, refusing to allow a person who is delinquent on child support to renew their car registration. You can read the article here.

I’m not sure what affect this will have on the State’s ability to collect child support payments. There are plenty of people that drive cars with expired registrations all the time. I think this may increase the number of cars that go unregistered.

Further, there are remedies that are available in court for enforcing child support payments. These court remedies can include probation and even jail time for failing to pay. If jail time is not sufficient to make a delinquent child support payor start paying child support, I am not sure that just refusing to allow a person to renew their registration will work.

Having said all of this, I am glad that Texas is getting creative in trying to ensure that child support is paid. I’m fairly certain that if I were receiving child support payments I would be relying on them each month to make sure bills got paid or hopefully a college savings account was funded for my children. I would want the State to work hard to make sure I got that monthly payment. Hopefully Texas continues to be creative in finding ways to encourage delinquent child support payors to begin making their payments.