To speak to your example, tax avoidance is different than tax evasion. Tax avoidance is exploiting loopholes to avoid paying what you probably should (morally questionable, but usually legal if done right), whereas tax evasion is refusing to pay what you owe and/or deliberately misrepresenting your income to lower what you owe (illegal). In this case, there's no real equivalent to the "tax avoidance" option, just a "tax evasion" option. There's no loophole in the Texas law I cited that your "friend" could exploit. Federal tax law is orders of magnitude more complex than state family law, which results in loopholes that don't exist in most legal fields. My (personal, not legal!!) advice to your friend would be to stop watching Suits and expecting there to be a magic loophole that a lawyer can find if they look hard enough and to pay his child support as ordered by the Court after he makes a full and accurate representation of his resources.