Understanding Child Support
Important questions:
- What do I do about child support when children are with other parent?
- What do I do when the other parent income is higher than he is claiming?
- What do I do when the other parent won’t deliver his tax returns?
- What happens when the other parent is delaying?
When separating, young children often stay with the mother. This is slowly changing but the majority of cases still turn in this direction. The financial consequences of this fact include the father’s obligation to pay child support. Unless the spouses make the same income and parenting time is equal, the person parenting less, faces a finance obligation.
One point to keep in mind is to get the obligation fixed and paid immediately so that arrears do not accrue. For example in the recent Ottawa case of Gordon v Guimont, 2016 ONSC 5323, Ottawa Superior Court Justice Doyle fixed the arrears payable by the father at $42,163.20. The father’s income was $100,000 and he was required to pay $854 per month.
In that case the father had taken the highly advisable step of sending an offer to settle. The offer was close to the Judge’s ultimate order and the judge would have taken it into consideration in awarding the losing party his costs, if the losing party had not done some else which was even worse.
For approximately eight years the father failed to deliver his tax documentation as required by the 2008 divorce order. The court penalized the father for this delay tactic by not awarding either party costs.
The mother would have gotten costs if her own view of what she was owed had been more reasonable but she held out for a finding that the father’s income was higher. She failed to prove this. Accordingly both parties paid their own costs.
What’s the moral of the story? A surprisingly large number of litigants in family law disputes think it is an excellent tactic to deny production or delay production for no legally important reason. Ultimately this tactic will backfire.
For more questions, please send an email.
Email: edward@ecconway.com
