@LM10000 - strap in, hopefully this gives you faith that right is might.
My children’s Dad lied to the CMS for 6 years to get a reduction. In 2013 he was living with a woman who had 2 children, therefore requested a reduction. He moved out (moved back in with his parents) in 2018 but failed to tell the CMS that he was no longer entitled to the discount.
I told the CMS this information in 2019 when I got my annual statement & noticed the discount. They said they’d investigate.
Then I forgot about it. Fast forward to 2024, I checked my annual statement for the first time since then & found the discount was still on there. For 6 years!!!! (My fault for not checking, but I’m not great at doing boring life admin)
I took this back up with the CMS. They have been consistently crap IME. I learnt (the hard way) to always kept a record of every single call I made to them. Eg. The name of who I talked to, what they said they’d do, how long each action will take…
They didn’t do any of the actions they said they would, so I then got my MP involved (for the 2nd time actually, the 1st time was a few years earlier)
The case got taken forward as a complaint. My feckless ex continued to ignore of all the CMS attempts to communicate with him. The case was eventually settled after I had provided proof (from the electoral roll) of his address from 2018.
The amount he had fraudulently claimed as a discount was backdated to the start of 2018 & his payments went up quite a bit as a result.
I also got a small amount of compensation by way of an apology from the CMS for them being so shit.
And for all the spiky people on here. I wasn’t after all his money btw. I was after the legally obliged amount - that he ought to want to provide for his children - to help pay for his children’s everyday needs.
But this is a man who sent me a text on the exact day our court ordered financial settlement ended (they only last 1 year) saying he’d left his job as a senior leadership teacher to go self employed, & therefore he wasn’t able to pay anything for his 4 children. To quote him - this will be the last month you’ll get any money.
To put this in context, I was a student at the time (trying to build a career for myself). The CMS made him pay the statutory £7 per week (this was for 3 children at that time, oldest was at uni). I think I worked out it was about 30p per child, per day! But eventually his ‘business’ went tits up, so back to teaching he went.
He has also always refused to pay me direct, so I had to apply to get the CMS to take it from his salary (costing him slightly more, and awarding slightly less to the children because the CMS take a fee for this service).
Meanwhile, I finished uni and now earn significantly more than he does now, which is why I don’t pay much attention to how much maintenance he pays. I learnt to live without it. He showed me that I could!
But it’s the moral principle of it all. While lying to the CMS to deny our children the money he legally needs to pay, he’s playing at Disney Dad of the year all over social media & giving motivational talks to men’s groups. Oh and also refusing to pay for our DS (the only one of our 4 children who has anything to do with him now) to have a haircut while he’s with him. Because, he told DS, that he was “overpaying already”. No, you’re just paying back the discount you lied about.
I suspect my story is not an isolated incident. That’s why I’m sharing, in case it gives hope to anyone else dealing with one of these ex idiots.