Avoiding child support payments is nothing new, but the way people try to hide their income is new. There are tried and true methods for obtaining child support. Obtaining tax refunds, garnishing wages and bank accounts are straightforward methods that work. However, these tactics rarely work for the gig economy. The gig economy is a fancy way of saying the self-employed economy. Another word that people like to use is freelancing, but it all means self-employed.
Why Being Self-Employed Makes It Harder for Child Support Collections
The self-employed rarely have tax refunds, and they almost always owe taxes at the end of the year. They can time their payments to the IRS to avoid ever having a tax refund. The self-employed often don’t have actual wages to garnish and bank accounts are often in a company name, not subject to garnishment for individual child support obligations. The self-employed are sometimes paid in cash which is almost impossible to trace or collect. For these reasons, the self-employed have always posed a problem for child support collections.
One of the obstacles with the gig economy is that when someone is self-employed is not easy to track their earnings or income. Employers report new hires to data bases for child support enforcement, but employers do not have to report contractors. This means that companies such as Uber or Airbnb do not report to these databases because they hire contractors and not employees.
How Can You Overcome This Obstacle?
Payments to contractors can be garnished once they are discovered and a private family law attorney can assist in collecting. But often the self- employed person moves onto a new gig once the old gig is discovered and garnished. The new gig economy poses new problems for child support enforcement and as the gig economy grows, so does the problem of child support collections.
Contact A Divorce Matters Attorney For Help With Obtaining Child Support
If you have questions, contact us here at Divorce Matters. We can help you try and recover child support if you find yourself on the wrong side of the new gig economy. Visit us at www-divorce-matters.com for more information.
