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Last year I was orderd to pay around £530 a month for CMS in February. In August they decided that based on information from the mother I was hiding around 125k of income per year (from previously being self employed and that was the company income, not personal income) so increased my contributions to 90% of my income as a permanent employee.
A week later, the court award full custody of our daughter to me with only supervised contact for 2 hours per fortnight for the Mother.
It took the CMS until December and the intervention of our MP (who heads up the CMS) to reverse their decision on the Mother's claims which were wrong, as well as recognise an order from a UK Judge that she had removed the child from the Mother (CMS agents own words - a judge does not order such a decision).
However, it then took a further two months before they accepted a new claim that I could apply for child maintenance with the child in my care. Their own calculations on the information we had from High Court papers of mother's income and job was around £700 a month.
The claim came through with the Mother only paying £10 a week as she had no income. She had refused to respond and they went back two years when she was still on maternity leave and had no income.
When confronted with the information presented to court, they started an investigation after much confrontation. Then COVID kicked in.
So Mother is only paying what they requested and telling the court she is a good parent and doing her part, while the court orders me to pay a share of the child contact sessions (around £300 a month for me) which actually eats into our monthly living money.
I have a meeting with our MP this week (still heads up the CMS) as the CMS still trying to make me pay money to the mother for our daughter - even though she is still in my care.
I stated to the MP that the CMS are a sexist organisation who treat father's, even those with the child in their care, with contempt.
Their actions resulted in me having to wait six moinths before allowing me to make an application. Their allowing the mother to refuse to participate in the process and ignore current information available.
Granted COVID means they are stretched, but surely, they will have to backdate payments once it is established the mother was working all along on nearly £100kl income.
I'm sorry for all this - this is so so bad and so typical of that flipping organisation.
The reality is that it is under so much pressure from some organisations - they have intentional policies that disadvantage fathers. They have been beaten into defunding variation teams. I could go on and on about how f*ked up they are but let's deal with your situation.
In your case, I would seriously consider hiring a solicitor to deal with them - consider it money invested given the sums in play. Essentially, you are investing X amount so that you claw back Y amount. If it makes sense for you go for it.
CMS payments are backdated to the date in which you make the application, but not anything before that.
Keep a log of all payments.
In their calculation they consider HMRC data from the past tax calendar year, so it's possible for it to be out of date. For example, say your calculation is done in March 2020. They consider tax year 2018/2019 so effectively nearly 2 years prior.
It is then on either parent to be honest and declare income difference of more than 25%. If she doesn't, you will have to show some evidence. But once again you'll hit the brick wall that is the defunded variation teams - at times there are only 2 people in the entire country who deal with them, and it is not uncommon for the backlog to be over 6 months or 1 year. It's really that horrendous. Add in Covid19 and literally nobody who knows what they are doing is even looking into your situation for months or even a year.
That was the first challenge - my daughter came into my care and due to their refusal to accept that a court order in August gave me custody, they still pursued me for payments. This meant an application could not be made until January six months later.
Her mother is a habitual liar (and the court order psych report provides further evidence of her behaviour at a far deeper level) and refuses to comply with any request.
If they do indeed reassess and backdate, that is over 4k to be added - they did if for me and demanded 90% of my income doing this.
Our MP, as I say is the head of the department managing the CMS, and last time she got involved, they responded in two days.
its stupid that they can not accept a court order from you that states the child lives with you?
they always ask for court orders when i mention shared care and overnight stays. is the child benefit under your name?
As of January, it was. Even getting that was a battle.
The Mother keeps stating how this is an INTERIM ORDER only. By the psych assessment she has states she has abused all her kids without realising. She then reported the doctor immediately for misconduct on release of the report to the court. Now contests this report must not be considered valid for any hearings.
Report even stated she would try this action and she was threatening the doctor during the process to write what she wanted.
Now our daughter to have an assessment as she had made allegations for three years now (even been arrested and cleared of some allegations, plus court found in fact finding these were all untrue) to ensure she is fine where she is with me - but she is trying to had documents hidden and threatening the doctor to come up with the correct outcome.
Would not think she was a practising doctor herself.
Very interesting discussion with our MP. She agreed this should have been resolved as it now appears the CMS are asking me to pay contributions back to the Mother although the child has not been in her care since August 2019. She agreed that there is a mismatch in how the CMS handle fathers compared to mothers. She has assigned a junior minister to investigate fully.
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