The U.S. already denies passports for unpaid taxes and child support — and now officials say proactive revocation is coming for some major child-support delinquencies. The reason for this is simple – according to reporting from the Associated Press and longstanding State Department policy, passport restrictions have become a key enforcement tool for unpaid government debts.
If you owe somebody a whole lot of money, there are plenty of ways to avoid paying it. You can ghost them. If it was due to a lawsuit, you can appeal. If someone did a job for you, you can claim they didn’t do a good job and deduct that from whatever you owe them. I mean, you don’t have to look far to see how some people historically haven’t paid the money they owe to others.
But once the courts (read: the government) are involved, it’s another story.
Sure, they may just garnish your paycheck. But instead of just taking the money, there’s another way to “entice” people to pay what’s owed.
They can deny your passport application — and in some cases, revoke a passport that’s already been issued.
If you owe the government tax money
Back in 2015, the State Department and IRS put a new process in motion regarding tax debt. It didn’t go into effect until 2018, but ever since then, if an individual has “seriously delinquent tax debt,” the IRS can certify that debt to the State Department. As per the IRS, the State Department will generally deny an application for issuance or renewal of a passport from such an individual, and may revoke or limit a passport previously issued to that individual.
If you owe child support
A similar law had been on the books since 1996 – if you owed at least $2500 in child support, you were at risk that the State Department would deny your request for a new or renewed passport until you paid your debt. That could mean upwards of ten years to pay that debt – and that was only if you approached the department for such assistance.
Still, even that has resulted in quite a few payments finally being made.
According to the Office of Child Support Enforcement at HHS, the Passport Denial Program has collected nearly $621 million in overdue child support since it began following the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, including nine individual collections of more than $300,000.
(Source: CNBCTV18News)
The rules are going to change
The rules are now about to change, according to a report by the Associated Press.
If a U.S. citizen owes a significant amount of unpaid child support, instead of waiting for that person to apply for a new or renewed passport (or request other consular services), the State Department plans to revoke the passport proactively.
Might not affect very many people
Although the new upcoming law initially SOUNDS like it might encourage people to pay their child support, the State Department is going to start with people who owe a very high amount of child support – over $100,000, according to an official. There are less than 500 people in the country who owe that much.
From the AP:
The official acknowledged, though, that if and when the threshold is lowered to a smaller past-due amount, the number of those affected will rise significantly. The official could not say when any further changes would take effect or estimate how many people might then lose their passports.
The State Department told the wire it “is reviewing options to enforce long-standing law to prevent those owing substantial amounts of child support from neglecting their legal and moral obligations to their children.”
Hopefully that will include people who owe less than $100,000, as those numbers, according to report by NBC Los Angeles, would be in the thousands.
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