The 4th Blog in the series will look at the Agency’s initial engagement with the NRP and how they behave and interact.
My advice is that it is imperative that you do not ignore the Agency as that gives them the excuse to apply the full weight of the Child Support Act (hereafter referred to as the ACT) enforcing your compliance and acquiescence to their demands. Having experienced this first hand, this is a situation you studiously want to avoid.
- Initial Contact (13th August 2009)
The CSA made initial contact on the 13th August 2009 and advised they were calling on behalf of the PWC in respect of my son, the Qualifying Child (QC). I was not particularly happy to confirm my name, my home address, my date of birth, my national insurance number and details pertaining to my company, simply because I had no way of verifying that the caller was who they said they were. Given that the Agency knew the answers to all the questions and given that we live in a world where data theft is one of the fastest growing crimes, I think the Agency should look at other ways of validating the person they are speaking to is in fact the person in question. I did however confirm that I was the biological father.
- The don’ts
As much as it is tempting to give the Agency case worker a full download of your personal circumstances, my experience is that it does nothing more than cause personal distress as the case worker has no interest in what you have to say.
In my case I explained I was living in London and working in Edinburgh. I had only just returned to work and due to my financial circumstances I only came home once every three to four weeks. I also advised that I had a minute of agreement [clean break settlement] in place and upon my return I would send this legal document to the Agency.
I also explained that my contract was for a three-month duration and that I could again be out of work by October. The case worker stated that if I intentionally made myself unemployed, then they had the right to base the maintenance calculation on my last paid employment and I would be assessed on that.
Correcting the myth – I can confirm that had I become unemployed as a consequence of my contract ending my change in circumstances would have been notified to the Agency and the maintenance assessment re-calculated based on my new financial circumstances. I have no doubt that the Agency would have tried to argue that I had engineered the change, but the ACT is quite clear on such matters.
It is examples such as this where the case worker arbitrarily lays out their misunderstanding of the ACT that the organisation begins to flex its considerable muscle. To my personal cost such erroneous interpretation has caused me endless grief and hassle
However, this case worker empowerment is actually encouraged by the Agency’s customer charter. For example, under the heading “reliable” the agency states that they will: –
- Always tell you what is going on in your case
- If they say they’ll do something, they’ll do it.
- They will get you the right information – and it will be the same information no matter who you speak to.
In essence, bullet b) serves to empower the case worker to carry out any threats that they may have issued in seeking your acquiescence, whilst bullet c) gives rise to what the Agency calls “the repeater letter”. By that I mean that the Agency is expected to get you the right information, so once a case worker has taken a decision, that decision will not be changed; it will not be challenged internally by the Agency; it will not be amended when under review and if you have the patience to escalate to the complaints team, they too will tell you the self-same information even if that information is patently incorrect. They do this by sending the same letter (i.e. the repeater letter), which states the same response as was sent by the previous reviewer. That way, no time is wasted on meaningless reviews because the Agency are clearly omnipotent and don’t make mistakes.
- Engagement
After the initial call in August 2009 there was very little contact between myself and the Agency. However, do not be fooled into assuming that the Agency have set aside your case. On the contrary, the Agency are progressing matters apace often going to extraordinary lengths to interrogate your financial status and looking at every opportunity to increase the amount of liability order they wish to serve upon you.
Having been contacted on the 13th August, my case took the following course: –
- The Agency received a copy of the Minute of Agreement on 24th August 2009
- On 03rd September 2009 The Agency wrote that the Minute was “not a maintenance order within the meaning of child support legislation” – See Appendix 1
- On the 10th September 2009 the Agency telephoned me but got no response and left no message
- Also on that same day [10th September 2009] the Agency sent a letter stating the PWC application for maintenance was valid
- On 15th September 2009 the Agency approached my accountant and demanded financial disclosure of my earnings by way of my personally filed tax returns
- On 20th October 2009 the Agency wrote stating child maintenance was £113 per week and effective from 13/08/2009[1]
- On 21st October 2009 the Agency wrote advising how they worked out the amount due
As per the footnote, the letter announcing the award (f above) could not be more intimidating. It is making it perfectly clear the action the Agency are prepared to sanction in order to ensure my compliance with their maintenance order. The content of the correspondence is unnecessarily aggressive which purposely seeks to put you on the back foot and to infer that you are behaving with criminal intent.
It should not come as a surprise that some NRP’s react badly to this type of aggressive approach and in my case this belligerent, accusatory assault set the tone for the remainder of my engagement with the Agency. I don’t hold myself at fault, for in truth, none of us would accept a bank or an insurance company speaking to us in this fashion in what is an initial engagement letter, so why should it be acceptable for a Government Agency to behave like an unlicensed debt collector?
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[1 -footnote] CMEC’s first communication advising me of the maintenance award stated “Your child maintenance is £113 a week and this is effective from 13/08/2009. This should be paid every week. You now need to set up your payments urgently”. It continued “If you don’t set up payments we may be forced to take further action against you. If you are employed we will take action to recover what you owe directly from your wages. Our legal powers are extensive and include the ability to seize property, suspend driving licences or even send you to prison. This is not our preferred course of action so please contact us and pay what you owe.”
A day later I received a breakdown of how the maintenance award was calculated: –
Maintenance at 15%
Average net weekly income £274.50 £41.00
Adjustments (£480.77) £72.00
Total Maintenance at 15% £113.00
To this day I do not know how these figures were arrived at, but this was the amount that was awarded and nothing I could say, present or argue would dissuade the Agency that the amount stated was due
Correcting the myth – Back in 2009 the charge calculation for a NRP who earned £200 or more per week, was a percentage of their net weekly income. For one child, this would be 15%, for two children this was 20% and for three or more children it was 25%.
I had been out of work for nine months. I did not claim benefits and I had only just returned to paid employment. I provided my bank statements to prove that I had received no income over the previous nine months so the assessment should have been zero rated. It was not.
Appendix 1
The setting aside of the MoA has been the single biggest divergence of opinion between myself and the Agency. The Agency wrote “Under the Child Support Act 1991 – Para 4 Section 10 a & b; Section 54 8(11) and in particular Section 9(4) where any agreement contains a provision which purports to restrict the right of any person to apply for a maintenance assessment, that provision shall be void”. (d)
I evidenced that there was nothing within the “Minute” that restricted ad hoc maintenance payments and in point of fact I was in the active process of raising £524 for a school trip to Paris for my son, the QC.
I did not understand the above section of the ACT and asked if the Child Support Officer (CSO) was legally qualified to adjudicate. On the 26th October 2009 CMEC wrote “Our case officers do not need to be named nor are they required to hold any legal qualifications to adjudicate on the jurisdiction of child support case. They are decision makers in their own right, backed by a robust and comprehensive set of online procedures supported by statute. In this instance when complex issues such as yours arise, they can defer to our separate Advice and Guidance Team, who had ruled in this case that the Agency has jurisdiction to correctly process the PWC’s application for child support”.
Blog 5: In the next blog, I will detail the value of clean break settlements, the dangers of making ad hoc payments and the escalation of my dispute with the Agency
Taking on Child Support 