Collection and enforcement methods
Where there is little or no evidence of a parent’s commitment to meeting their child support
responsibilities or where there is evidence of fraud, we rely on enforcement activities to
ensure we achieve the best outcome for children, parents and taxpayers.
Employer deductions of arrears
A paying parent can choose to have their child
support payments automatically deducted from their pay on a regular basis, which can be
really convenient. However, if you refuse to pay your child support or enter into a
satisfactory payment arrangement, we will ask your employer to make child support deductions
from your pay.
Enforcing tax return lodgement
We work hard to ensure the incomes we use in child support assessments are correct. We work
closely with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to
improve the rate and timeliness of parents’ tax return lodgement. This ensures child support
calculations are more accurate and it reduces the number of assessments calculated using
default incomes.
For the 2008–09 financial year, all CSA parents (not just paying parents) must lodge a tax
return unless their taxable income was less than $18,808 and they received an Australian
Government pension, allowance or payment for the whole financial year.
Intercepting tax refunds
Most child support parents are Australian taxpayers. The ATO advises us when a tax refund is
available to a child support parent and is about to be paid. We may take the refund and apply
it to meet an outstanding child support payment.
Intensive debt collection
We are extending our intensive debt collection activities to target an additional 22,500
parents per year. We plan to intensively manage more parents who have outstanding payments
that have proven more difficult in the past to collect.
Issuing overseas travel bans
If a paying parent has overdue child support and refuses to work with us to pay the overdue
amount, we can prevent them from travelling overseas by issuing a
departure prohibition order (DPO). A DPO is an
administrative order that we can issue to prevent parents from leaving Australia until they
pay their overdue child support or negotiate a satisfactory payment arrangement. We don’t need
a court order to prevent a customer from leaving Australia.
Litigation
Where other enforcement methods haven’t worked and where an asset or income stream is
identified in the customer’s name, we’ll take parents to court to collect outstanding child
support payments.
Optical surveillance
In our more serious cases, we may also use optical surveillance to help us investigate complex
avoidance arrangements.
From 1 July 2008, CSA will trial covert optical surveillance in a limited number of serious
cases where there is a suspicion that a parent has committed an offence under child support
legislation, such as providing false or misleading information in relation to their child
support case.
The trial is set to run for 12 months.
View more information about optical surveillance.
Prosecution
This step is available to us for the most serious actions or omissions involving criminal
behaviour by customers and employers.
Minimising income to increase or decrease child support payments
We match data from other sources and act on tip–offs to identify customers whose income does
not match their lifestyle. We then undertake financial investigations to ensure that parents
are paying and receiving the right amount of child support. If you are minimising your income,
we can find out about it and you may be required to repay child support.
Areas of income minimisation we are investigating:
-
either parent earning income in the ‘cash economy’, for example ‘cash in hand’ from the
building, domestic help and other industries
- parents earning their income as non–salary and wage, for example business income
-
using corporate veils (companies, trusts, partnerships) to hide or reduce taxable incomes
that results in minimising child support obligations
-
parents who legitimately reduce their taxable income and fringe benefits; we can add these
amounts back on to establish a more accurate child support assessment.
Economic Security Strategy Payments
The Government is providing the one–off cash bonuses to stimulate the Australian economy.
The Child Support Agency will not be proactively targeting these payments to recover unpaid child support.
CSA will however continue to undertake normal enforcement activities where Section 72A notices are in place on bank accounts to recover unpaid child support where no payment arrangements are in place.
That is, where the bonuses flow to bank accounts for paying parents with outstanding child support liabilities and where CSA’s bank account garnishee powers are already in place or are applied at a future date as a result of business as usual enforcement activities, the tax bonus payments and any other monies in the account may be subject to the garnishee provisions.
The Child Support Agency generally uses its powers to obtain funds from bank accounts only after discussion and negotiation with the debtor has failed.