Our Profession
For decades, private attorneys have helped custodial parents enforce their court-ordered child support order. In the early 1990s, private child support enforcement agencies, devoted solely to helping custodial parents obtain their child support, joined in this effort and began serving thousands of families all over the nation. Today there are an estimated forty private child support enforcement agencies helping to collect child support for tens of thousands of families.
With generally lower caseloads than their governmental counterparts, private child support enforcement agencies are often able to solve even the toughest child support cases. The General Accounting Office has reported that private enforcement agencies are working more than twice the number (57%) of interstate
cases as government enforcement agencies (24%). These are cases that the government considers to be some of the most difficult to pursue.
We are proud to report that to-date, our member companies have collected more than $300 million in child support for American families, the majority of whom had not received a child support payment in more than four years.
With the amount of unpaid child support growing from $34 billion to $106 billion in just the ten-year period ending fiscal year 2005, it is clear that private child support enforcement agencies are an important part of the solution to this growing problem.