Sacramento County Shows Great Improvement in Child Support Collection

The California Department of Child Support Services recently recognized the child support collection agency in Sacramento County for having made the greatest improvement in child support collections. Sacramento County has an impressive overall performance in child support collections among all the large counties in California. According to estimates, in 2010, the Sacramento County collection agency collected $105 million in payments.



California family lawyers may find Sacramento County’s performance even more impressive, considering that child support collections in California fell dramatically last year. In 2010, the state of California collected $2.2 billion in child support payments, a sharp 1% drop from the previous year. Additionally, 57.7% of California's child support cases were reported as being in arrears at some point during 2010. That rate is up from 56.2% in 2009.

There was also a sharp drop in child support collections through wage withholding, which continues to be one of the biggest ways of collecting child support payments. Such payments fell 5.5% from 2009. There was also an increase in child support payments collected through unemployment checks, by 62%.

All of these estimates have simply reflected the dismal state of the economy in California, which continues to struggle with an unemployment rate that is at least 2% higher than in the rest of the country. There are simply more numbers of people receiving unemployment checks in California, and child support payments tend to be easier to collect through unemployment checks.

The state of child support payments in California also mirrored the national picture. For the fiscal year ending September 30th, 2009, the total collections amounted to $26.4 billion, a decline from .7% from the previous year.