Social Security Disability is through the Social Security Administration which is Federal and part of that is not to just help support the disabled person, but also that person’s family. If that person who is disabled has dependent children, the payments would be increased to provide financial support for both the parent and his/her dependent child(ren). It is called “Dependency Benefit” where things can be more problematic, it is the social security disability or disabled parent who is divorced, or what is called a non-custodial parent, the parent that does not have the child(ren) with them pays child support. What the government should do is separate the payments to the SSDI recipient, and the dependency benefit is paid for the dependent children, and it can e-pay directly to the other parent.
It can be even more complicated if there is a separate child support order and the question would be about the parent that is receiving the separate child support order, do they receive that separate child support order plus the dependency exemption for the non-custodial parent, that would be considered a double payment. So, Massachusetts courts credit the Social Security disability dependency benefit payment against the child support order. For example, if the child support guidelines say that a parent needs to pay $150.00 a week in child support and Social Security disabilities pay $100.00 a week for the dependent child, the custodial parent would receive that $100.00 a week, and the disabled parent would only have to pay that additional $50.00 a week. It would be the idea that it would be a fairer amount of child support and the person receiving the child support is not getting a double-dipped amount.
Another aspect would be if the dependency benefit for SSDI is above what the child support amount would be, the Federal Law does say that the custodial parent would keep those additional monies.