One in four children in Virginia is involved in a child support enforcement case. That means many of those children aren't getting the funds they need from a delinquent parent.

So for the last year Virginia has using cell phone records to track down these parents, and make them pay.

Valley Social Services Director, Elizabeth Middleton has seen a lot of families struggling over unpaid child support.

She says, "It's a great financial burden on the parent that does have custody and that parent is on their own to try to pay all the expenses for the children."

She says most of the support isn't paid because child support enforcement officers can't find parents dodging the bill.

"People who have gone to extreme measures to avoid their obligations to their children. [One] person left and moved to Poland and took up residence there to avoid paying child support for many, many years," says Middleton.

To help with the problem, Virginia looked for a new way to track down delinquent parents. So they looked towards cell phone records because 76 percent of Americans use one.

"We went to the cell phone companies and asked them to voluntarily do that, so we used both federal and state laws that we have an issued subpoenas," says Nick Young with the Division of Child Support Enforcement.

Now a handful of those cell phone companies are cooperating. Child support enforcement officials say it’s making a big difference.

"We just sent them 268,000 records, they did a data match and they sent me back 52,000 phone numbers and addresses I didn't have," says Young.

Right now Virginia is only working with a handful of cell phone companies but as more sign on, child support officials say they'll be able to track down just about anyone.

Virginia was the first to start this kind of program. This week, officials from all over the country are meeting in Orlando, Florida to make it a national program.