Overdue child support approach

CSA's approach to collecting overdue child support is guided by the compliance strategy – CSA: Supporting parents to meet their child support responsibilities 2008-2010.

Our approach differs for each parent, according to their motivation to pay and the likelihood of them meeting their responsibilities. To ensure appropriate financial support is provided to Australian children, we will to provide parents with the right balance of customer service, education and enforcement activities.

For most parents, our focus will be on making the system easier to use and providing support, education and assistance. However, parents who continue to avoid making child support payments will face a comprehensive range of advanced detection and enforcement actions.

In situations 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, taxpayers and parents. We tailor our response to address the particular situation of the customer.

At all times, we endeavour to use an approach that is:

• Considered reasonable, with the level of intervention limited to that required to achieve commitment
• Considered balanced, with customers being aware that we listen to ‘both sides of the story’ and their cooperation will help us achieve the correct outcomes.
• Communicated clearly to customers, so they know their responsibilities, how to meet them and the consequences if they fail to meet them.