Ministry of Gender Equality and Family: "We will establish the child support advance payment system by next year"

Child Support Payment Target from 2026
Establish Collection System with Financial Institutions for Single-Parent Families Below 100% Median Income

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family announced that it will establish a system by next year to introduce the 'Advance Child Support Payment System,' where the government pays child support in advance and later recovers the amount, aiming to start payments from 2026.

Shin Young-sook, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, explained this during a pre-briefing for the 17th 'Public Discussion on Livelihood Issues with the People (Youth Edition)' on the 5th. The Office for Government Policy Coordination and related ministries also announced at the briefing that they will gradually introduce the 'Advance Child Support Payment System for Single-Parent Families' to support young single-parent caregivers.

When asked about the specific implementation plan, Vice Minister Shin said, "To establish the legal basis, we will promptly proceed with inter-ministerial consultations so that the system can be introduced by the second half of 2024," adding, "We are preparing to build the system so that it can be implemented as early as the second half of next year once the regulations are established."

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family explained that they plan to secure the legal basis by the second half of this year and build the system by the second half of next year. They added that advance child support payments could begin as early as 2026.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

Regarding the support amount, they responded that it is "under consultation with related ministries." As for the criteria and target recipients, they expect it to be about 16,000 households with incomes below 100% of the median income among approximately 17,000 single-parent families (out of about 65,000 households) who have child support claims but have not received payments.

Concerning the low recovery rate of child support, they explained, "We will utilize existing sanctions and methods such as property inquiries without prior consent to improve the recovery rate."

Regarding the agency responsible for collecting child support, they stated, "We can say that it will be expanded from the existing Child Support Enforcement Agency," and added, "We will establish a collection system that can effectively perform this task, including banks and credit rating agencies." Currently, the Child Support Enforcement Agency conducts its own collection from child support debtors according to the national tax forced collection procedures and imposes sanctions such as public disclosure of names and driver's license suspension.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.