Oklahoma Child Support Essay

Divorce is a difficult situation for any member of the family. However, it is especially difficult when a child is involved. Both parents must work together in order to ensure that their child is well-taken care of, whether they live with one or both of their parents. The best way to do this is to provide an adequate amount of financial support to that child. Oklahoma Child Support Services works to improve the lives of children of divorce by assisting the courts and parents in establishing an adequate amount of child support to be paid, ensuring the child support is paid, and establishing medical care orders and child care orders. Oklahoma Child Support Services is a division of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. They work with parents,

The obligor is the person who is ordered to pay child support and the obligee is the person who child support is being paid to. The obligee can be a person who the court orders child support to be paid to or it can be DHS (Oklahoma 2017). To determine the amount of child support that is to be paid, OCSS must determine both parents’ adjusted gross income. OCSS defines adjusted gross income as the net income of the parent. This includes social security benefits and excludes any alimony from other cases, child support paid for other children, and any personal or jointly-acquired debt of both parents (Oklahoma 2017). OCSS also provides a list of earnings that are not used in determining the parents’ gross income. Examples of this include food stamps, disability payments, and any money that was given to them only for the benefit of the child (Oklahoma 2017). Once the gross incomes of both parents are established, they are then combined to come up with a total income. That income is then used to determine how much of that money should go towards support of the child and each parent’s share of that support (Oklahoma 2017). If custody of the child is not split, the non-custodial parent automatically becomes the obligor. If there is split custody of the child, the parent who owes the larger amount of support becomes the obligor (Oklahoma