Child Maintenance Tribunal

[Whatamigoingtodopleasehelp]

I'm not sure if this should be posed in Legal, so I apologise if its in the wrong place.

I claim cms from my ex husband for my daughter. It the claim started February last year. My Ex did not pay and refused to, ignored letters and reminders from cms. Anyway, the arrears kept building and he delayed the process many times. This included disputing dates etc, I then had to supply cms with evidence. He did this lots of times, the cms agreed with me and upheld the claim each time. Th claim got transferred to the taking it out of his wages stage and he took his dispute to mandatory reconsideration stage. He was rejected again.

Last week I got a letter/sort of notice thing telling me he was taking it to a tribunal. It asked if i wanted my address kept confidential in any future evidence i submit.

I have looked online and I can find information about taking something like this to a tribunal but not how to proceed as the person being on the receiving end.

does anybody have any experience of this situation? or can briefly tell me what to expect please? I'm presuming it won't be Rumpole of the Bailey style. Is it a quick thing? Will we have to argue it out? Will i get sent paperwork before hand? Is it a bit like a 'real' court situation?

We had an in person child maintenance tribunal a few years ago - ex didn't want to pay a penny.

It was just Judge, ex and me in a room (a friend I took for support was allowed to sit at the back).

Judge asked ex questions about his income, asked me if I wanted to ask ex any questions. It lasted about 20 minutes.

The findings were then given to the CMS.

The next step was an online hearing with a Judge and a representative of the CMS. CMS had produced an enormous bundle of all the evidence that had been submitted by both me and ex (over several years): ex and I were both sent copies. All this evidence was used by the Judge to make a decision regarding the maintenance payments.

What happened?!

The outcome was that they didn’t believe his declaration of a 1p per annum wage (funny that), calculated a more realistic income for him and he actually started paying. He’s paying off 3 years of arrears too.

That's great news! Great work 👏🏽

Ex is still lying about his income though! I’ve just started another appeal. The CMS has changed their processes to look at assets held by the paying parent.
He’s trying his best to get away with paying the very minimum.

Do you have a link to the change in CMS process? I have my tribunal in less than two weeks. Then I will have my annual review shortly after and I know will be back at square one. (His HMRC return negligible but asset/capital v rich). Like yours, very resistant to paying

@Kathy1970 have you got a CMS account? If so you’ll see on there.
I’ll try to get a screenshot if you haven’t.
You can’t include their home - you can include additional properties and other assets.

I have a CMS account but so far everything has been assessed on 11k tax return. They've recently found some unearned income but he is challenging this. Moving forward I can see he has applied to strike off his limited co. and as he's now state pension age, is presumably hoping to be assessed on the £7 flat rate. Unbelievable. There's nothing he won't do to avoid paying CMS. I desperately need him to be assessed on capital and assets, he's worth millions, identifies as penniless pensioner when it comes to paying for his child, it's horrendous

@Kathy1970 ring them up and ask them to take into account assets - have you got details of them?
What info is listed for his company on the Companies House Government website? You can get financial info from there.