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I'm after some advice please, I have two children aged 28 and 26 i have never paid CSA payments ever As I gave her cash every week, Suddenly i received a letter from the CSA Stating there is a debt of over £4000 no dates for which the debt is from... CSA said I need to provided evidence of payments how the [censored] can anyone do that.... i dont know what to do now any advice welcome please...one child lived with me for years and the other child lived with my x wife
If you received a letter from the CSA it probably won't of been the first letter you received. You need to be clear/sure about who the letter is from however as CSA and CMS are not the same thing, they do/deal with largely the same thing but the powers they have and how you deal/interact with them are different.
The CSA is winding down and all cases are transferred to the CMS.
I think fairly typically what was/is happening is this:
1) Case exists with CSA some time in the past
2) Case for whatever reason gets into arrears ( parents not paying, CSA mistakes etc etc ) as a result it never gets closed
3) At this point one or both parents may forget all about it - or indeed not even know that there was an issue as both parents are happy with payments made/received.
3) Fast forward to these few years
4) CSA want to close all cases - for obvious reasons they can't just close cases
5) Some/many/all cases were transferred to the CMS - as part of that any outstanding arrears that the CSA had a record of were transferred over to CMS cases to be pursued.
6) In those cases the parent owed the money was written to and asked if they want they debt to stand or if they wanted it written off. ( The default was to stand, and parent had to take action for it to be written off ).
7) I would assume a similar thing happened for cases with children who are beyond 16/full-time education.
8) However I would also guess that there is good chance CSA don't have correct address for many parents ( no reason to inform an agency yuo no longer deal with when you move ).
At some point a CSA case was opened and was active. Hard to know/tell if it was a short time ( say £300 per month for 13 months ) or a longer time ( £22 per month over 15 years ). I think in some cases parents opened up CSA cases, they went active - but nothing ever happened so parents sorted out between them selves and forgot about the CSA case ever existing. As the CSA were in lots of cases petty useless they had cases building up arrears and literally never did anything about them until the CMS was crated and the purge of old cases started.
All you can really do is contact them and ask for more details.
If appropriate I guess also contact your ex and see if she has any info or knows anything.
As for proof as you used cash unless you have an receipts, emails confirming stuff etc I would imagine it would be difficult - unless your ex states that the money is not owed.
Excellent advice there from DavidChannon... this seems to be happening a lot when cases are being moved from the old system.
Best of luck
From the age of your children, there's the possibility that your case could be pre-2003, but as above, you need to know from them how these arrears have come about.
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