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Committee adopts amendment and re-refers bill to Judiciary to end two-year automatic child-support COLA
Summary
Representative Peggy Scott's bill would end Minnesota's two-year automatic cost-of-living adjustments for child support orders and align practice with federal three-year review requirements; committee adopted a start-date amendment and re-referred the bill to Judiciary.
Representative Peggy Scott presented House File 2,456, a bill to repeal Minnesota's two-year automatic cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for child support orders and instead follow the federal three-year review process for adjusting orders. The committee adopted a DE1 amendment clarifying the bill's start date and voted to re-refer the bill to the Judiciary Committee.
Trish Schopenhammer, director of the Child Support Services Division in the Ramsey County Attorney's Office, testified in support of the bill and described why the COLA mechanism is now outdated. She told the committee that child-support practice has shifted from a formula that only considered the payer's income to an "income shares" approach that looks at both parents' incomes; as a result, a flat COLA can produce increases that are not tied to actual changes in parents' earnings. Schopenhammer said COLA increases have sometimes reached 14 percent even when pay increases did not approach that level.
Under the bill, Minnesota would rely on three-year reviews required by federal law and perform individualized reviews rather than an automatic COLA every two years. Schopenhammer said the change would help keep orders "right-sized," which increases the likelihood that ordered payments are actually made.
The committee adopted Representative Scott's DE1 to clarify the effective start date for changes and then re-referred HF2456, as amended, to the Judiciary Committee by voice vote.
The testimony cited federal requirements, including the Social Security Act and applicable federal regulations, as the statutory backdrop for child-support review obligations.
