Plan for fee on child support dumped

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- The state backed off a plan Thursday to deduct a $25 processing fee from certain child support recipients after lawmakers voiced opposition.

The Department of Social Services had planned to start taking the fee March 30 from the tax refunds that it intercepts from noncustodial parents with overdue child support. The fee would have reduced the amount of money the department passed on to custodial parents.

But the department received complaints from legislators after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a story Wednesday about the proposed fee.

On Thursday, department spokeswoman Deb Hendricks said, "We rescinded the rule to allow for additional discussion to change who pays that fee."

The reversal was the second by the department in recent days. On March 10, it pulled back an emergency rule that would have recalculated -- and reduced -- state subsidies to nursing homes that care for Medicaid recipients.

The department plans to come back soon with a revised rule on nursing home payments. But it has no immediate plans for a revised rule on the processing fee for child support collections.

Instead, Rep. Richard Byrd said he would try to pass a bill allowing a fee to be collected directly from the noncustodial parent, without reducing the money going to the child.

The Legislature's Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, which Byrd leads, had scheduled a hearing Thursday on the rule authorizing the $25 fee.

"We were probably going to have rejected the rule," said Byrd, R-Kirkwood.

A committee vote against the child support rule, however, would not have stopped it from taking effect. Rather, the full Legislature would have had to reject the rule.

Hendricks said the department's proposed rule was a response to a verbal suggestion last year from legislators -- she could not recall by whom -- to try to recoup some of the state's costs for handling child support collections.

Department officials had concluded that taking the fee from tax returns would have the least impact on custodial parents, because it occurs only once a year and tax refund checks generally are larger than other child support checks, Laura O'Mara, assistant deputy director of the Division of Family Services, had told the Post-Dispatch.

Ten other states already charge fees for intercepting federal tax refunds.

Sen. Chuck Gross, R-St. Charles, who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he complained about the fee Wednesday to the interim director of the Department of Social Services.

"Their reasoning was that it's more difficult from a legal, technical standpoint to be able to get it out of the guy paying the child support. So it was easier to get it from the woman," said Gross. "I said, 'I don't care, that's wrong, we can't be doing that."'

O'Mara estimated that 8,670 parents would have had their child support checks reduced by the $25 fee, which could have raised $217,000 for the state. She said some of that money would have helped cover processing expenses. The U.S. Department of the Treasury charges states $12.65 each time a state reroutes a noncustodial parent's tax refund.

Until recently, the rule change had received little public attention.

The proposed rule received no public comment when originally published last fall. Similarly, the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules took no action on the rule during its typical window to do so between Nov. 23 and Dec. 23, said Cindy Kadlec, the committee's director.