Not paying your child support? North Dakota, tribal nation buckle down to improve collections Thursday, November 7, 2019
G.F. Herald
Child support enforcers in North Dakota and the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation are looking into why some parents don't pay across state and tribal lines.
The child support programs of the North Dakota Department of Human Services and MHA Nation received a $500,000 federal grant to study how child support payments fall through the cracks when one or more parents is living in a different state, tribe or country than a kid. The grant, announced this week, is one of nine that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded to child support agencies.
About a quarter of North Dakota child support cases involve another jurisdiction. And when that happens, only about half of the collections are paid. That compares to cases where parents reside in the same state as their child and three-quarters of the collections are paid.