Introduction The Child Support Organization currently operates under the state government. Although each state enforces their child support orders using similar guidelines some use different guidelines. This organization needs to be totally revamped. There are two reasons this system needs an overhaul and I have two ideas that I believe can be implemented to help them thrive going forward. Using Kotter’s eight step approach I will present the plan to transform the organization.
Company Overview Although the office of child support enforcement which is a federal entity oversees all the child support agencies on the state level, I will focus on one agency. That agency is the child support agency in Fulton County Georgia because I am familiar with that agency. The Fulton County department of human services division of child support services enhances the wellbeing of children by locating the Non-Custodial parent. The non-custodial parent is the parent that does not have custody of the child. They also establish paternity, handle support orders, enforce and modify support obligations and the collect and distribute child support payments. They promote parental accountability while reducing the public’s responsibility for giving financial and medical support to the children (dcss.dhs).
Diagnosis
There are two main areas that I believe the division of child support is failing in. There are also two new initiatives that I feel can be implemented that will help the agency function better and that will help everyone involved. The first area that they are failing in is locating the absent fathers. Since child support is handled on the state level instead of the Federal level it is difficult for the states to work together when the non-custodial parent leaves the state that the child resides in, or when they never lived in the same state. Based on personal experience it can take several months or several years for the agency in another state to take over a child support case. If the father is located and has no job he has to find a job or be faced with going to jail. Unless the custodial parent stays in touch with the agency the non-custodial parent that has no job can fall through the cracks. If the noncustodial parent falls through the cracks the custodial parent has to fight to get the state she lives in to communicate with the state the non-custodial parent lives in. Once this line of communication is finally established only the child support agent from the custodial parents’ state can call or communicate with the child support agent in the non-custodial parents’ state. The custodial parent is now at the mercy of the child support agent handling her case. This child support agent may have thousands of other cases and since an out of state case is more taxing and more work, the child support agent may not stay on top of the case as much as she does her other local cases. The second area of concern I have with the child support agency is the jailing of the non-custodial parent if they fail to pay child support. The child support agency has several enforcement tools they use in order to help persuade the non-custodial parent to pay child support. The first tool thy use is wage withholding, then tax offset, then passport denial and asset seizures (ACF.HHS). If all the above does not work and the non-custodial parent still does not pay they can be placed in jail. In order to solve the first problem the child support divisions in all states should be placed under total control of the Federal government. There should be one uniform way that the non-custodial parent is located and then held accountable for not supporting their child that resides in another state. Whereas all the states have only three different models whereby they determine how much of the non-custodial income is to be collected (the income shares model, the percentage of income model and the melson formula) they do not share this similarity when it comes to locating the non-custodial parent. Some agencies use the Sheriff of the state that the non-custodial parent is in to find that person. Some work with the non-custodial parents’ probation officer if they have one. Others only attempt to locate the non-custodial parent after the custodial parent demands that actions are taken to locate them. This is a huge problem that would be rectified if every state child support office was placed under the complete and total control of the Federal government. There would be one universal way that the non-custodial parent is located and then there would not be a delay across state lines in reference to the time it takes for an agent to handle the case. One agent would be responsible for the non-custodial parent therefore doing away with the barrier that state to state agents have now to helping the custodial parent. Every state has their own guidelines that determine when a non-custodial parent should be incarcerated for non-payment. In Fulton County arrears have to be at least 5k, no payments made in the last six months and the department of child support services has exhausted all resources to locate the non-custodial parent. In Maryland they first intercept federal and state tax refunds, report the parent to the credit bureaus, suspend their license, both personal and professional, intercept lottery winnings, garnish all financial accounts, deny passports and then they put them in jail(DHR.STATE). Although I agree with all the actions taken to enforce the non-custodial parents to pay, I don’t believe jailing them serves a purpose. Yes they are in contempt of a court order, but the reason why they are in contempt of that court order should be taken into consideration. Most men that are not paying their child support aren’t paying because they are unemployed. If the non-custodial parent is in jail his or her arrears are still accruing and they can’t work if they are in jail. In the end the non-custodial parent suffers but the child is still not receiving child support. The model for revamping this part of the failing child support system is from Europe.
Covert’s (2015) study found the following: As of 2010, all European countries except the Netherlands guaranteed child support payments to custodial parents even if the noncustodial parent couldn’t pay or could only pay part. Sweden goes even further and has a guaranteed assistance program in which all custodial parents get a child support payment from the government no matter what, and the government then collects what it can from the noncustodial ones. Such a system seems to work — 95 percent of these parents get child support payments. This system “gets you a guaranteed minimum benefit whatever the nonresident father can pay,” explained Irwin Garfinkel, a professor of social work at Columbia University.
He thinks this model could significantly improve the system if the United States were to take the same tactic. “From the perspective of the children, I would say that’s the single most important thing that could be done,” Garfinkel said. Any such reform, however, would also have to be paired with changes to how we calculate what noncustodial parents owe. American fathers have the highest obligations among 14 of the richest countries, even if they are poor or unemployed (in eight countries, an unemployed father doesn’t owe anything). The U.S. is one of four that doesn’t exempt some portion of the noncustodial parent’s income for basic living expenses. Only five countries are so extreme as to jail fathers who don’t pay.
Garfinkel proposes making sure the obligation is always a percentage of the noncustodial parent’s income. “That would protect the fathers,” he said. “If you express the obligations as a percent of income, it would automatically reduce the amount of harassment possible.” If a father has no income coming in, then he wouldn’t be obligated to pay and wouldn’t keep racking up debts as many do now. Mothers would also benefit in the long run, given that even a poor father’s income is likely to eventually increase down the road. A guaranteed payment program, particularly one that doesn’t always try to recoup the costs from low-income fathers who can’t pay, would not come for free. But Garfinkel thinks the amount would be negligible compared to the benefits reaped. Even if custodial parents were guaranteed a payment as high as $3,000 a year, he estimated it would cost the government about $10 billion. Compared to the overall federal budget, “it’s not a big number and it would make a massive difference,” he argued. Poor mothers would not just have more income to invest in their children, but the stability of steady payments could be even more beneficial for children’s development. Strangely, part of the American system was meant to act somewhat akin to Sweden’s for the very poorest, but today ends up being counterproductive. When welfare was reformed in the 1990s, one change enacted ensured that if a custodial parent gets benefits from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), any child support payments from the noncustodial parent are taken by the state, not doled out to the parent. “That was the basic concept of welfare,” explained Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women’s Law Center, “that the state would pay public assistance and then collect child support and keep the child support to reimburse itself.”
Today, however, TANF payments are nearly all worth less than they were in 1996 and only reach a quarter of eligible families. Meanwhile, the system usually serves to discourage poor fathers from paying their obligations, given that they know their money isn’t going to actually make it to their children and the families aren’t usually getting an adequate amount of help from the state. As Elizabeth Lower-Basch, policy coordinator at CLASP, a policy organization for low-income people, put it, “Why on earth would you pay money to go to the state?” One state, Wisconsin, experimented with changing its program from one where it withholds all child support payments for welfare recipients to now being one that directly gives custodial parents most of the support the noncustodial parent pays. In 2006, it evaluated this change and found that it ended up increasing how much noncustodial parents paid and how many custodial parents got support. More states could consider doing the same, but they aren’t incentivized to: they would have to make up for the money they no longer took from child support payments. There are also some efforts across the country to change the way that noncustodial parents’ support obligations are calculated. Currently, when courts hear from a father that he doesn’t have a job or enough money to pay support, some states still calculate the child support payment on his supposed earning capacity or deem that he voluntarily lowered his earnings by taking a lower paying job or even getting fired. And, of course, there is the fact that if a father ends up going to jail over unpaid support, he can still keep accruing debt while he’s there. The Office of Child Support Enforcement proposed changes at the end of last year that would base child support orders on actual earnings and income, not imputed income, and allow incarcerated people to modify their orders rather than treating it as voluntary unemployment. Some states have also experimented with incarceration diversion programs that would allow noncustodial parents to enter into employment services rather than go to jail. Texas has one of the longest-standing programs, which has increased child support payments and made them more consistent, even after participants leave the program. The challenge, however, is that there isn’t any dedicated funding available to states to create these programs beyond diverting money from the TANF block grant they receive. (p.231-253)

Kotter’s Eight Step Approach

Based on Kotter’s eight step approach I would revamp the child support agency in the following ways. First I would establish a sense of urgency. In our text it states that Kotter argued that large change plans generally fail if there is not a sense of urgency created and realized first. The sense of urgency refers to the “pressing importance” of action needed to address critical issues…now (Kotter, 2008). The child support agency would have to be approached in such a way that all involved in the total transformation of the agency understood how urgent the need for change is. Although concrete plans would be laid out, all involved would understand that this initiative to change the system from state control to federal control wasn’t going to be an initiative that was just handled haphazardly; they would know that the change was going to be quick and swift. This would be the way a sense of urgency was translated to the teams and ultimately carried out. The team managers and leaders would have to own total control of how the sense of urgency was transferred to their teams. According to Kotter the second stage of planning change is to form a powerful guiding coalition by assembling a group with enough power to lead the change effort and encourage the group to work as a team (Weiss, 2012). For the two initiative’s that I have proposed it would take the executive levels forming the collation that would trickle down to the managers and ultimately to the team in order to see the revamping of the child support agency. Their first initiative would be to get the powers that be to see the need to transfer the agency from state control to federal control. Once that initiative was successfully carried out, then they could start working on changing the way the decision is made to incarcerate a non-custodial parent. was discussed in the course. The market structures are, Perfect Competition, Monopolistic Competition, Oligopoly and Monopoly. Once I have spoken on those four market structures I will then discuss two of the market characteristics of each market structure. I will give one real-life example of a market structure in my local city and relate the example to each of the characteristics of the market. I will also discuss how high entry barriers in the market influence long-run profitability of firms. I will explain the competitive pressures that are present in markets with high barriers to entry. I will explain the price elasticity of demand in each market structure and its effect on pricing of products in each market. I will describe how the role of the government affects each market structure’s ability to price its products. In conclusion I will discuss the effect of international trade on each market structure. When speaking of perfect competition there are six basic assumptions related to it. The first assumption is that there is a large number of sellers in the market. The second assumption is that there are a large number of buyers or consumers in the market. A large number means that no one buyer can affect the price in any way. It also means that no single purchaser has any market power. The third assumption is that perfectly competitive firms produce a homogeneous product. That means that the product of one firm is no different from that of other firms in the industry. With that being true it means that consumers have no preference of one producer over another producer. The fourth assumption is that there is free entry into and free exit out of the market. Meaning businesses can go in and out of the market without any type of constraint. The fifth assumption is that there is perfect knowledge. The sixth assumption is that workers and other resources can easily move in and out of the industry (Amaher & Pate, 2013). there were a lot of factors that I had to consider. First I had to determine whether or not a raise in tuition would benefit the school in the short or long run. Our text states that “Short-run decisions are those concerning the profit-maximizing use of the existing (fixed) plant and equipment (Amacher & Pate, 2013).

References:
From Child Welfare to Child Well-Being
Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research Volume 1, 2010, pp 231-253