Opinion ID: 2137054
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Child Support Guidelines.

Text: In an effort to improve the adequacy of child support payments throughout the United States, Congress passed the Child Support Enforcement Amendments in 1984 and the Family Support Act of 1988. Under this legislation, states were to develop and implement child support guidelines. 42 U.S.C. § 667. The use of guidelines, based upon a mathematical formula, was intended to remedy the inadequate, inconsistent, and ineffective case by case approach for setting child support. Under the federal act, each state was to establish guidelines for child support award amounts by October 13, 1989. Pursuant to legislative directive, we adopted child support guidelines effective October 12, 1989. Under the law there is a rebuttable presumption that the amount of child support which would result from the application of the guidelines is correct. 1989 Acts ch. 166, § 6 (codified at Iowa Code § 598.21(4)(a) (1991)). The court cannot vary the amount of the child support without a written finding that the guidelines would be unjust or inappropriate under specific criteria. The guidelines include charts for use by the court. The 1989 guidelines included four charts to fix the support for one, two, three, and four or more children. A copy of the 1989 guideline chart for two children is attached to this opinion as Appendix A. Amended child support guidelines were adopted in Iowa effective December 31, 1990. The 1990 guidelines enlarged the list of specifically enumerated items that were deductible from gross monthly income in arriving at net monthly income. They also revised the chart percentages and increased the number of charts to include one, two, three, four, and five or more children. A copy of the 1990 guidelines chart for two children is attached to this opinion as Appendix B. Although the trial court was required to fix monthly child support based upon the 1989 guidelines, we apply the current 1990 guidelines in our de novo review. See In re Marriage of Lalone, 469 N.W.2d 695 (Iowa 1991); In re Marriage of Ladely, 469 N.W.2d 663 (Iowa 1991); In re Marriage of Bergfeld, 465 N.W.2d 865 (Iowa 1991).