Your child support check might be a little less starting Oct. 1. Here’s why.
Starting next month, the amount of money you get in child support might be a little less than you’re expecting.
The Sedgwick County District Court’s Office of the Court Trustee, which handles child support monitoring and enforcement for about 6,000 area families, is upping its fee from 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent on Oct. 1 to help defray operation costs, including the rising price tag of technology and employee benefits.
The office monitors child support orders that haven’t been referred to the federal IV-D program, which mainly handles child support cases for people receiving some type of state assistance.
The increase is the first for the office in more than 20 years, according to a news release from Court Trustee Carl Wheeler.
Only two Kansas court trustee offices charge less than a 3.5 percent fee for their services, the release said; most charge 4 or 5 percent.
Because the fee is deducted from a support payment after it’s collected from the parent who pays it, the parent receiving the money will get a little less than they’re used to — around a dollar for every $100 in support ordered — after the increase takes effect.
That’s about $5 less — roughly the cost of two gallons of milk — than before for a parent who’s supposed to get $500 a month in child support.
Wheeler said for the majority of parents, “the impact will be minimal, only a couple of bucks a month.”
The increased fee “will allow the Trustee’s office to continue to process the high volume of cases and transactions in the quality manner the public has come to expect,” he said in the release.
The amount of child support ordered can be changed so the parent receiving it doesn’t bear the full cost of the fee increase.
But it’s up to the parents to ask for that, Wheeler said.
For more information, call the Office of the Court Trustee at 316-660-5909, send an email to nivd@dc18.org or go to www.dc18.org.
This story was originally published September 25, 2018 at 5:20 PM.