Taking A Look At Single Moms This May
Thanks to Mother’s Day, we often think about the selfless role our mothers play in our lives during the month of May. We’re no different here at Support Collectors, which is why, in honour of this past Mother’s Day, the team is turning a spotlight on the single mothers who are working hard every day for their families. Without a doubt, it is a difficult job, made only more challenging when vital child support is missing from their budgets. Unfortunately, our profile reveals a lack of support is a hard reality for many mothers across the country.
The Office of Child Support Enforcement reports $108 billion of child support payments have yet to arrive in the hands of custodial parents. While this stat is grim on its own, it’s made worse by a government clause that limits the amount of support these parents can actually receive.
If a custodial parent has to rely on welfare to make ends meet while the non-custodial parents fails to make payments, the government will take 49% of the support owed as reimbursement for the financial assistance. That means out of the $108 billion owed in back payments the government will skim $53 billion in compensation.
Sounds like a raw deal, doesn’t it? Though this system hurts all those involved — including tax payers — it’s especially damaging to single mothers. There are approximately 13.7 million single parent families in America. Roughly 80% of them are headed by women, and nearly 41% of these single mothers register under the poverty line.
Joan Entmacher is the former Vice President of Family & Economic Security of the National Women’s Law Center. Her work in improving the economic security of low-income women led her to investigate the dearth of child support payments and its effects on single mothers. According to Entmacher, there are twice as many impoverished single mothers as there are single fathers.
Entmacher and her team uncovered the fact that for low-income mothers, child support payments make up 45% of their income. When nearly half of your income goes missing because of deadbeat fathers, daily life becomes a true struggle. But it becomes almost unmanageable when you realize that nearly half of that is dedicated to the government in order to pay back any funds used in assistance.
That’s why our services at Support Collectors are such a vital cog in the mechanics of our federal child support system. We have a proven system that finds NCPs faster and enforce payments with a higher chance of success than government child support agencies — which means low-income individuals can spend less time collecting welfare when they child support collection agency.
We like to call it the “high-tech” and “high-touch” approach. The high-tech method is similar to what other agencies use, in that we use online searches to troll special databases in order to ping NCP. Our team follows up with any matches these searches may produce.
How we differ from public agencies is our high-touch technique. While we let our computers do some of the work, our team still does most of the heavy lifting as we engage in labor-intensive investigations. We personally track down NCPs’ employers, friends, neighbors, and anyone else who could shed light on their whereabouts.
Once we find them, our negotiation specialists convince them to make payments on a consistent basis. Though our negotiators are highly trained individuals, they’re also backed with the ability to garnish wages and place liens on assets should they not immediately appeal to the NCP’s better judgement.
That’s how we’ve been able to help single mothers connect with the money they’re due since 1996. If you’re ready to try a tried-and-tested way to get your child support, contact Support Collectors. We’re ready to help single mothers get what they deserve.