Bladen County Sheriff’s Office cracking down on parents not paying child support

BLADEN COUNTY, N.C. (WECT) - The Bladen County Sheriff’s Office and the Bladen County Department of Social Services are teaming up to crack down on parents who are delinquent in paying their child support.

In June, the sheriff’s office began what it calls a deadbeat parent campaign.

“The purpose of that was to go out and serve out child support papers and collect on any of those delinquent fees for child support,” said First Sgt. Richard Allen of the Bladen County Sheriff’s Office.

In one day, deputies arrested 13 people and 12 additional people turned themselves in to law enforcement.

“As a result of the June campaign, after the word got out of what we were doing, Sgt. Wilkins is one of our sergeants here, he kind of spearheaded that thing and once he got out in the community and started to pick up some people, we actually got people calling in wanting to know how much they owed, ‘how much can I pay? Can I go ahead and pay it?’ That was the reason we were able to collect $22,000 for June,” Allen explained.

In June, the sheriff’s office collected $22,224 in purged payments compared to just $8,747 the month prior.

There are 2,092 child support cases in Bladen County serving over 1,900 children.

“It’s something we’re really trying to amp up for child support, to get those people to pay for their children and we also arrested fathers and mothers. It wasn’t just a deadbeat dad kind of campaign, it was more of a deadbeat parent because we arrested males and females for this,” Allen said.

Allen said they plan to increase efforts with the goal of collecting more money each month.

“Every six months we’re going to do a roundup and try to focus on the child support and picking up those payments and getting those purged for DSS because that’s a large amount of money that’s being processed and moved through the court system that we’re not collecting back and the parents and children aren’t getting back as a result,” he said.

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