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 2007-08 financial year, all CSA parents (not just paying parents) must lodge a tax return unless their taxable income was less than $18,252 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 chid 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.

Salary sacrificing

CSA is working with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to automatically add salary sacrificed amounts to income for child support purposes, to ensure child support assessments are correct and people aren’t salary sacrificing in order to reduce their child support income.

These changes will commence 1 July 2009.

View more information about salary sacrificing.

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