It Is a Form That Summarizes a Child Support Order
Video Transcribed: What is a support order summary form in Oklahoma? I’m Oklahoma lawyer James Wirth, and that’s the question that we have today. It’s part of our series related to Oklahoma child support and the child support guidelines.
And like many of the other questions that we’ve dealt with in the other videos, this one is statutory and it can be found in the law books. It is Title 43, section 118D, subsection I, and I will read what it provides.
It says, “A completed support order summary form shall be presented to the judge with all paternity and child support orders, where the Department of Human Services is not a necessary party pursuant to section 112 of Title 43 of the Oklahoma statutes.” And then it goes on to say, “No such order shall be signed by the judge without presentation of this form.”
So by statute, this is a necessary form to present when you’re trying to get your final order that has a child support order included in it signed. According to this, the judge cannot sign it unless it has that form. Now I can tell you that very often judges will sign it without this form, and it gets through quite frequently.
The law says you have to have it. That’s not always enforced. But if you do have a judge who’s enforcing it or you want to make sure you’re fully complying with the law, then you want to have that support summary order. So what is that and what is that for? Well, essentially that is required for the purposes of collecting data.
So, that support order is going to include social security numbers for the parents and the child and it’s going to include a summary of what’s in the child support order, and what those terms are. And then you present that with the order. Judge signs off on it. And then that form doesn’t stay with the judge. That is sent to the central case registry to compile statistics for it.
Now you only have to do this when DHS is not an interested party. Why is that? Well, when DHS is an interested party, they’re the ones that are submitting the information to keep this register up to date. So this is all related to probably federal law that provides some funding to the state perhaps.
There’s a lot of uniformity related to child support and issues such as that, and because of that, the powers that be up high want statistics of what’s going on down below. So they create these forms. Then they require that they be produced.
However, how well that is being enforced on the lower level can vary from judge to judge and county to county. And it seems like there are crackdowns at some point and everything’s got to be perfect and submitted, and other times they’re just a little more lackadaisical about it and not really looking for those orders.
But regardless, if you want to comply fully with the statute, you’re going to need that. And if you want to make sure there’s no reason for the judge to reject your order, then you want to have that child support summary form ready to go.
If you’ve got any questions about Oklahoma child support guidelines, or issues of child support in Oklahoma, you’re going to want to talk to an attorney about that privately and confidentially to get legal advice. To get that from somebody at my office, you can get that scheduled by going online to makelaweasy.com.
