You’re right, and since 2008, even more people have had trouble meting their financial obligations for support. The trend seems to be for more and more states to look to both the ex-spouse and their new spouse to meet support orders. Contacting your State’s Child Support Enforcement division will get the ball rolling.

https://fabenefits.dhs.tn.gov/vip/vipwebsite/html/JSCheck.html

I see you’ve posted the question from Arkansas, about Tennessee garnishment rules. To give some general information on your case, let’s assume that there was a court order. To begin with, make sure you are sure that you have the complete support order or enforceable agreement. If possible, go to the place where the order was issued and recorded, and get a certified copy of the compete record. Sometimes, an order may even be inaccurate from what the judge had said, or you may be uncertain about interest payments for late support amounts.

Get ready to calculate how much back support is owed.

http://www.state.tn.us/sos/rules/1240/1240-02/1240-02-04.20080815.pdf . Tennessee even has an on-line program for you to “plug in” facts and figures to arrive at an estimate: http://www.tn.gov/humanserv/is/isdownloads.html .

Depending on what state courts are (or have been) involved, the rules on collecting payments may change, and the difficulty of getting payments can be harder. You’ll possibly even find that some state case workers feel “too busy” to help with another state’s child support orders. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be: if you feel you’re not getting real help, you have a right to complain. Before you do, take a look at the rules of how Tennessee state case workers are required to enforce an order and work across state lines. http://www.tn.gov/humanserv/cs/cs_handbook.pdf

Regardless of whether you are all in Arkansas or in the two separate states, there are some fairly common laws about when wages can’t be garnished. For this answer, though, I’m going to be looking only at Tennessee. Here are the general rules in Tennessee: the state applies what are known as federal exemption rules. This has historically given some rights from losing all wages to garnishment order. Your case will be complicated by finding out if your ex-husband’s wife shares her income with him. Are you certain they are married or simply co-habiting? Is your ex receiving unemployment? But Tennessee also allows garnishment against back child support, and these are not subject to the federal limits. Instead, Tennessee has adopted only two basic limits on child support garnishment:

(1) For someone providing custodial support, the maximum is 50% of the wage-earner’s disposable income;

(2) For someone not providing custodial support, the maximum is 60% percent of the wage-earner’s disposable income.

You also suggested some reluctance about the possibility of his serving jail time. Most judges don’t want someone to go to jail over child support based on an impossibility of paying (such as from unemployment or disability).

Keep in mind, the State doesn’t really care very much “where” the money comes from. There was a case in 2004 that began looking into some limits on enforcing an order for support. http://caselaw.findlaw.com/tn-court-of-appeals/1333194.html Tennessee limits suits on types of judgments (in the case I just mentioned, it was 10 years), but there’s a lot of flexibility in enforcing a child support judgment. This might be especially important in the case you’re describing, since you didn’t mention when the payments were ordered, or how old the children are, or what specific agreements your ex-husband may have had regarding payments.