June 19, 2007

Supportkids....what a joke update.

I have a response to "Supportkids...what a joke" that came directly from Supportkids. I thought since we are telling them what crooks they are for taking our money, I would post their response along with another pissed off parent. The guy that responded to this(from Supportkids) needs to not toot his own horn quite so loudly. As you can see by the response at the end of this blog, I'm not the only one fed up, BTW-if you want to read the whole story, its in my February blog archive. However, I just got the new response today. First, a word from the company themselves:
Lori:I am an employee of Supportkids, and I’m sincerely sorry that you are disappointed with our services. We’ve helped over 50,000 parents collect their child support and most are very thankful for the help they’ve received.Our average client has gone over four years without receiving any support and is typically owed in excess of $30,000. From your blog it sounds like you were actually owed more than that, which means the other parent either wasn’t paying or was only paying sporadically when you came to Supportkids. I guess from our viewpoint, we would consider our work for you to be an outstanding success since you are now receiving regular payments. I wish we could speed up the checks you receive, but we simply can’t get them to you any faster considering they are traveling by mail.Yes, Supportkids does charge a fee for its services, but it is a contingency fee which means clients don’t pay us unless we collect. I’ve heard our clients say over and over that it’s better to receive 66% of something than 100% of nothing. I’m guessing you thought the same thing when you signed up with us. Regarding our contract, we do try to explain our fees as clearly as possible. For example, your contract says on the middle of the first page in the same size type as the rest of the contract: “The Amount I Will Be Charged for Supportkids’ Services – I will pay Supportkids 34% of each payment received until all of the Specified Amount has been paid. . .” We try to make that unambiguous, because the last kind of client we want is one who doesn’t understand the contract. That makes for a difficult working relationship.Now, I hope I haven’t upset you with my response, since that’s not my intention. I share your frustration with the payment processing times and you are not the only person who has voiced that concern, and the concerns have been heard loud and clear by us. You will be interested to know we are working on a process to receive payments from California by electronic transfer which will greatly decrease the time it takes for the funds to be sent to Supportkids. We are also developing the technology to then send payments to you via direct deposit. So, I hope you will try to be patient with us as we work on these solutions to better serve our clients.I want to applaud you on your new blog, and I think you make some excellent points in your most recent entry entitled “The statistics are unreal. . .” Your conclusions are supported by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement which reports that parents in the United States are owed over $106 billion in unpaid child support and that each year almost half of the nation’s child support cases don’t receive any payments at all, which translates to over 8 million children without any support.I wish you luck with your new blog, and hopefully with cooperation from the State of California we can resolve your payment processing concerns.
Here is the response to my blog:
I wonder if this employer would hire supportkids for himself? Yes they did state that their fees would be 34% of every payment. But why should you get 34% when you guys aren't doing anything. We paid a finder's fee for you to locate the NCP parent. I was told that you guys go for lump sums and liens so those fees with acceptable to me. All supportkids did for me was find my NCP so that he could start where he left off. Now they are taking 34% of my payments just to sit there... That's not helping our children.. Yes 66% is better than nothing but your not doing anything differently that my local child support agency would do for free!!!!
If there is anyone out there with some legal expertise regarding this issue, please contact me. Obviously there is a big problem going on with this company and single parents need to know what they can do.

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