SEPARATED parents owe their ex-partners more than $1 billion in child support payments, the Auditor-General reported yesterday.

The Australian National Audit Office investigation into child support reform found that half of separated parents are failing to pay all, or any, of their child support liabilities.

The audit report, tabled in parliament yesterday, criticises the Child Support Agency’s performance, despite a five-year reform process that cost taxpayers $877 million.

There has been much talk from Dunne Nothing about making changes to Child Tax modelled on the Australian changes. What the changes in Aussie are starting to show is that no amount of tinkering with the fundamentally flawed Wisconsin percentage of gross income formula approach works.

When will the politicians and officials admit that the formula approach is fundamentally flawed and unworkable,? What amount of evidence will it take? Formula based child tax systems are failing world wide and tinkering makes them worse, not better. Why? Because a formula assessment for calculating child tax is fundamentally flawed.

IRD is blinded by the concept of the formula being a “best practice’ approach to child tax. Before accepting any best practices at face value, it’s a good idea to determine what evidence underlies them.

Given the evidence showing world wide failure of formula based child tax assessments I suggest that, in relation to child tax, we have a world wide worse practice approach that derives from a methodology that is ideologically driven by some vague notion of parental responsibility that is only applied to separated parents and not to parents in intact families.

To sum up look around the world and you will see example after example of worse practice in supporting children post separation.

Regards

Scrap