Abstract
North Carolina's child support regime exists as a composite of three sources of law: statutes, case law, and the North Carolina Child Support Guidelines. These sources have not evolved in tandem to produce a coherent synthesis of policy rationales. One aspect of the law that implicates conflicting policy goals is the use of a parent's potential income instead of their actual income at the time oftrial (a practice often referred to as "wage imputation'). The Guidelines are a synthesis ofstatutes and case law predicated on the "income shares" model, the ostensible goal of which is to provide children with the same financial support they would enjoy if the child lived in an intact household with both parents. Wage imputation evolved in case law, first as a means of preventing husbands from deliberately avoiding their family support obligations, and now functions as a means of imputing income to anyone the court inds to be under- or unemployed as a result of "bad faith" blurring policy goals and conditioning case outcomes on judges' particular moral and ideological beliefs. This Comment argues that "badfaith" has become a dangerously broad concept that exceeds its legitimate policy purposes and should be reformed by the legislature to protect the interests ofparents and children alike.
Recommended Citation
Scott Daubenspeck, Are Parents More Than Money? Proposing Reform of North Carolina's Wage Imputation Doctrine in Child Support Cases, 47 Campbell L. Rev. 103 (2025).