Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
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Absent parents of welfare children who aren’t paying their share of child support will have the Internal Revenue Service on their backs next year.
Past-due money that they owe for child support will be taken out of their federal tax refunds under a new law authorizing the IRS to make such assessments.
James O’Brien, administrator for the Hawaii Child Support Enforcement Unit, said a list of about 1,000 names of delinquent Hawaii parents will be sent this week to Washington for action by the IRS.
He said the unit has closer to 2,0000 parents who have been contacted and have refused to show up in court or comply with court orders for child support payments.
However, he said all of the names can’t be submitted for tax assessments next year because of time constraints and the manual work involved.
“Next year we would hope to get a much larger number because our computer system will be completed,” he said.
The Washington office of child support enforcement will consolidate Hawaii’s list of names with lists from other states and submit them to the IRS by December.
When the IRS matches an absent parent with a delinquency with its list of tax refunds, the parent will be notified that an assessment will be made of the amount owed for child support.
The parent will have 60 days in which to respond. After that, the amount will automatically be deducted from the person’s tax refund and sent to the state as a child-support payment.
O’Brien said the only restriction is that the absent parent must be at least $150 delinquent in payments and the state must have made a reasonable effort to collect the money.
He said the IRS will charge the states $23 for “each hit” that it makes — where refunds are due and an assessment is made.
“The thing about the IRS is that it behooves these people to make these payments because I, for one, don’t want my name on an IRS list, regardless of what it’s for,” he commented.
Just the threat of IRS involvement is expected to encourage a lot of delinquent parents to catch up on their child-support payments.
