Listen to this article

A court order for child support is worthless if a parent doesn?t pay up. Simone Spence says she can help when that happensBiz Spotlight – Small Business

In early September lawyers for Denise Ghanem and her ex-husband Joseph faced off in front of a pair of state Appellate Division judges. For Denise, a primary issue was collecting a backlog of more than $24,000 in unpaid child support that had amassed since the couple?s May 1991 divorce. It?s the kind of situation that Simone Spence, who runs Child Support Solutions, sees all the time.
?There?s a big distinction between getting a child-support court order and enforcing it,? says Spence,who faced her own problems collecting child support from her ex-spouse. ?A lot of women never see the child-support payments to which they?re entitled. For many of them, hiring a lawyer or a collection agency is too costly, and government efforts are well-intentioned but not that effective.?
Spence has written a book called ?Deadbeats, What Responsible Parents Need To Know about Collecting Child Support? and lectures across the country on the subject. Her six-person Newark-based firm offers a suite of services designed to give a custodial parent the know-how to locate an absentee ex and force him or her (although she says that 97% of the time it?s a father who?s the laggard) to pay up.
?Child Support Solutions got its start in 2002 after my book received an enthusiastic reception,? she explains. ?I realized that there were a lot of people out there facing this kind of problem.?
One of them was a lifelong welfare recipient who, by age 28, had 10 children by eight different men. None of them were contributing to child support. ?We helped her to identify six of the fathers, and today she?s getting child support from six of them,? says Spence. ?Today the woman is off of welfare and enrolled in a job-training program.?
Spence?s company teaches four basic categories of skills: obtaining a court order for an appropriate level of child support; tracking down an absentee parent; locating his or her income and assets; and getting a court to follow up on collecting the child-support payments. She bills $399 per topic and also offers such services as credit-report checks and the tracing of hidden assets or income.
She says her coaching offers a kind of lifeline to women who may be emotionally and financially desperate. ?At some point many women give up trying to collect the child support that they should be getting,? explains Spence. ?There?s an emotional side to our coaching services that can help them regain the determination to follow through and assert their rights.?
All this comes at a cost, and while Spence?s clients are often financially strapped, her contracts seem geared to extract money from the most vulnerable. For example, her Website notes that a customer can pay Child Support Solutions using ?pay day? withdrawal. Under this option?usually used by people without a checking account or credit card?payments are automatically withheld from the client?s paycheck. Customers who need to stretch such a payment by dividing it into two equal withdrawals can do so, but are charged a fee of $25.00 per every $100.00 deferred for the period.
Spence reports that her revenues have climbed from under $1 million during the fiscal year ended October 31, 2004, to between $1 to $3 million for the current fiscal year.
Based on figures from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, there?s plenty of room for the business to grow. Nationally, some $102.3 billion of child support was in arrears as of 2004, up 6.8% from $95.7 billion in 2003. New Jersey accounted for about $2.2 billion of that in 2004, about 4.7% more than the $2.1 billion recorded in 2003. While New Jersey?s past dues are far below California, which is No. 1 on the list with $18.9 billion in arrears, the amount is significantly higher than Connecticut, which racked up $1.5 billion.
East Brunswick attorney Theodore Sliwinski has represented?and sees?both sides of the child-support conflict. He says that the state is slow to act against a parent who falls behind on payments. But he understands that in a high-cost state like this, it can be tough for a parent to meet the obligation.
?Usually, a person has to be six months past due before a judge will issue an arrest warrant for nonpayment of child support,? Sliwinski says. ?Sometimes they don?t want to pay because the custodial parent is violating court-ordered visitation rights. It becomes a tit-for-tat routine.?
Other times, he says, a parent may have to choose between paying child support and the rent. ?Sometimes the court will yank a driver?s license from a nonpaying parent,? he notes. ?That only makes the problem worse, because then the parent can?t go to work.?
As Spence sees it, paying child support is a matter of facing up to responsibility. ?You?ve got a duty to help to support your child,? she says. ?I sleep better at night knowing that our company is helping to bring that about.?
E-mail to [email protected]