(This is Section 316 of the Uniform Act.)

This section combines many time-tested procedures with additional innovative methods for gathering evidence in interstate cases. The amendment to Subsection (a) ensures that a nonresident petitioner or a nonresident respondent may fully participate in a proceeding under the Act without being required to appear personally. This was always the intent of the provision, but the text was ambiguous in this regard.

Subsections (b) through (f) greatly expand the special rules of evidence originally propounded in RURESA which are designed to take into account the virtually unique nature of the interstate proceedings under this Act. These sections provide exceptions to the otherwise guiding principle of UIFSA, i.e., local procedural and substantive law should apply. Because the out-of-state party, and that party's witnesses, necessarily do not ordinarily appear in person at the hearing, deviation from the ordinary rules of evidence is justified in order to assure that the tribunal will have available to it the maximum amount of information on which to base its decision. The intent throughout these subsections is to eliminate by statute as many potential hearsay problems as possible in interstate litigation, with the goal of providing each party with the means to present evidence, even if not physically present. See Attorney General v. Litten, 999 S.W.2d 74 (Tex. App. 1999); State ex rel. T.L.R. v. R.W.T., 737 So.2d 688 (La. 1999).

Perhaps the most dramatic of the 2001 amendments affecting these special rules of evidence is the change of a single word. The authorization in Subsection (f) of telephonic or audiovisual testimony in depositions and in hearing now substitutes the word "shall" for the word "may." Adoption by the States may herald the day when every relevant court room will be equipped with a speaker phone, at the minimum, if not cameras and audiovisual receivers. This amendment will also eliminate decisions such as Schwier v. Bernstein, 734 So.2d 531 (Fla. App. 1999), which construed the use of electronic transmission of testimony to be wholly within the discretion of the tribunal. On a related track, the 2001 amendments to Subsection (b): (1) recognize the pervasive effect of the federal forms promulgated by the Office of Child Support Enforcement, HHS; (2) replace the necessity of swearing to a document "under oath" with the simpler requirement that the document be provided "under penalty of perjury," as is required by federal income tax form 1040.