Maintenance Guarantee Fund director explains how Latvia acts when a parent stops paying child support
The news site NRA.lv has published an interview by journalist Kristīne Kravcova with Edgars Līcītis, director of the Maintenance Guarantee Fund administration. It covers how the state secures child support and collects debts from parents who do not pay.
The Latvian news site NRA.lv has published a video interview about unpaid child support. Journalist Kristīne Kravcova speaks with Edgars Līcītis, director of the administration of the Maintenance Guarantee Fund. The fund is a state body that secures maintenance payments for a child when one parent stops paying after a family separation, and then administers the recovery of the debt. The subject matters to families whose children depend on such payments.
What the interview covers
The conversation explains how the fund came about, how many non-payers there are in Latvia and what the typical non-payer looks like. It also looks at the motives that lead a parent to give up this duty, the amounts each parent must provide for a child, and whether a parent can apply for and receive support without complicated bureaucracy and without going to court.
One group of questions concerns sanctions: whether they make it harder to avoid paying, and which are the most painful for non-payers. The interview also tests common assumptions, such as whether debtors work in the public sector, whether all of them are malicious non-payers, and whether 13% of non-payers are in prison or care centres. It also asks whether women are among the non-payers, how many fathers raise children alone, and whether a parent raising a child alone is automatically at risk of poverty.
Comparisons and solutions
The talk touches on how maintenance is granted in Finland and Sweden, and why there is no basis to claim that child benefit in Latvia is lower than in other countries. Līcītis discusses whether it is easy for debtors to apply and agree on repayment, and why trying to disappear from view does not solve the problem. Also discussed are introducing compulsory secondary education and its effect on the number of debtors, the term “poor rich people”, paying support when contact with the child is impossible, and the role of human resource management policy in the country.
