Child maintenance calculations

Markneath

I paid maintenance to my ex and as a paying parent there can be many  frustrations with the system and I watch my girlfriend have issues now as the receiving parent on the opposite side of the system.

The system isn’t great but just accept the figure the cms give you especially if he’s paying it without issue.

You cant blame him for expecting an over payment back, if he had made an underpayment you would expect it put right!

My ex wife always assumed I earned more than I did and never counted pension payments as a legitimate deduction.

I’m doing ok now but after my divorce I was very cash poor and struggling with a lot of payments to make each month, I always paid what was due to my ex but she always expected more as if I had pots of cash. 

Her attitude was he lives in that expensive house and drives that nice car, in reality I was tied to both, struggling to make the monthly payments and would happily have handed the car back or sold the house if I could have.

Spendless

Is the discrepancy down to you including the 18yo or any overpayment due to this? What is your daughter doing? If she's now working including on an apprenticeship or out of work and claiming benefits then your ex won't be liable for maintenance, payments for her. I can see how you might feel annoyed by this, because at that age they're not fully independent financially and the resident parent still ends up subsidising costs, but there's no legal requirement for an absent parent to pay a that point as far as I'm aware.  

Huxley71

@markneath, @Spendless

Thanks for taking the time to comment, and yes, there has been an over payment which I accept my ex is perfectly entitled to claim back, although as Spendless suggests, whether or not I consider this to be "fair" under the circumstances is another matter entirely! However, regardless of my opinion of my ex's moral compass (or lack thereof) my gripe is with the CMS rather than him, because ultimately he is indeed paying the specified amount and I'm all too well aware that many fathers (and quite possibly some mothers) fail to do even this.

I have asked the CMS for clarification of their calculations multiple times and they have failed to provide these, despite the fact that they are legally bound to provide "details of any other deductions to the calculations and reasons for them" They also continue to deduct contact costs in relation to my son whilst having simultaneously acknowledged the absence of shared care and have deducted weekly contact costs for my daughter, for whom there has never been shared care in place for two and a half years and frankly, even if he had had contact with her I'm struggling to comprehend the rationale whereby contact costs are multiplied by the number of children in question unless he picked one up and dropped them off and then came back for the other one! This is clearly maladministration.

I'm absolutely not prepared to sit back and "accept" blatant ineptitude from an organisation whose very purpose is to implement the welfare of not only my own children but hundreds of thousands of others too.

Spendless

Is there an official complain you could make? I don't mean ring up, I don't mean email in. I mean via their complaints procedure with all the evidence you have quoted and it backed up. 

Huxley71

@Spendless
Yes, having belatedly realised the futility of communicating via their online portal or over the phone I have begun the formal complaint process, currently awaiting a response but judging from my experience to date I'm not expecting it any time soon!