CMS

[ChristinaParsons]

Has anyone had any success appealing?

I can't even get them to take a complaint seriously. Basically they don't give a toss and neither does anyone else - least of all the parent who doesn't want to pay! Good luck though!

Mmmm. Poor love only earns £200 pounds a week. Yet on his form E he has declared an income of £118,000 a year

Have they checked his income with HMRC?

Of course. CMS is calculated on his tax returns. You don’t pay tax on dividends though

Did he include any proof of income with the form e?
My ex told Cms he was earning £24,000 but had sent wage slips with form e stating £47,000. (He had sent in payslips from a temporary job and not updated with the new one) I sent copies into Cms and told them he had sent them to me with some other paperwork (all true as the form e came to my house) they took bloody ages to recalculate and I had to really fight to get heard but eventually they caught up and he's been paying the back log for the past year. I strongly suspect that he's done similar again (he changed jobs) but I won't be able to prove anything this time. Also interestingly Cms have never been able to find his details when they 'draw down' from hmrc... he's an accountant, a very good one so it's all a bit dodgy. Hmrc were no help when I inquired about investigating as they said it would be the employers responsibility to update records despite me telling them he may well have been the one in charge of that.

Have you applied for a variation based on the dividends? I think that's the next step.

He is a contractor so his pay is set when he signs the contract. How he chooses to pay himself is what CMS base maintenance payments on. It’s so unfair. He will be paying less than 1% of his income on child maintenance

You do pay tax on dividends over about £5k, and he should be declaring his dividends on his personal return (if you're in the U.K.). From this year the tax free dividend allowance falls to about £2k

CMS can take dividends into account though - either at the end of year review, or sooner with a variation if the impact of the dividend is to increase the payer's income by 25% or more. It takes a special kind of bastard to try and deprive their own children of the legal minimum child support.

Just to clarify, is he a contractor who runs his own limited company?

If so, surely they should base his contribution on his personal tax return, which should include all dividends in it?

Also, if he's only contracting for one company full time, his employer could be falling foul of legislation that stops companies avoiding employers NI etc, think it's IR35. HMRC don't take kindly to that!