The Child Support Agency Lost Files

this was not my intended next post but a snippet of life in-between.

Part of being a stepmum is the CSA Experience.  The good old Child Support Agency.  If you’re lucky you will never experience the stressful confusion they spread amongst broken families.  The parent with care will unleash their revenge by starting the process of a claim through the CSA.  As my husband and I went through court to get decent and regular access to his son/my stepson, why would he not pay towards his keep, he adores him.  Anyway, it seems that at every available opportunity of a review, his ex submits one.  She is married now to a man who owns a successful business, they have two or three holidays a year, eat out two or three times a week, buy expensive clothes etc, they have little need for the money and yet, she still complains that she does not get enough.  My husband pays the calculated amount of child maintenance that he is entitled to pay, buys clothes for him as he arrives in his school uniform for the weekend, feeds his son and teaches him good, honest morals and nurtures and loves him.

The CSA are hell.  They have told my husband that he is underpaying, then he is overpaying, then he is underpaying again.  They haven’t applied shared care at all even though numerous copies of the court order for access were submitted. We give up.  Right now my husband is standing in a Tribunal because he has apparently never submitted paperwork to inform the CSA that regular contact was taking place yet he has provided this many times over the last 5 years!  They have LOST all the paperwork from his file.  How?  His ex, despite my husband never missing a payment, always paid on time and paid the full amount asked, has written to slate the CSA and how incompetent they are and demanded a Deductions of Earnings Order (DEO) against my husband’s wages.

An extract taken from the Governments Child Support Agency www.csa.gov.uk website.

“Taking money from wages

If the non-resident parent works for an employer or receives an occupational pension, we can take child maintenance direct from their earnings or pension using a ‘deduction from earnings order’. This is one of the main methods of payment that employed non resident parents can choose. If they have not chosen to pay this way, it is normally the first step we take if a non-resident parent who is employed has missed payments and cannot give us a good reason why, or if they fail to agree a method of payment with us.”

My husband has not chosen this method of payment or missed any payments so it would be against their policy and the law to go direct to his employer without prior consultation with the non-resident parent, i.e. my husband.

I await the outcome.  It is unfortunate that my husband’s ex has been receiving too much money and would have to pay it back but it is not actually her fault, it is the CSA for miscalculating and losing paperwork.

For those suffering at the hands of the CSA I’ve just stumbled upon a website for those living their own CSA hell and the site is aptly named www.csahell.com a place to vent, submit your own story, get advice about dealing with the wonderful (ahem) organisation that is the Child Support Agency etc.

I have all my fingers and toes crossed for positive outcome and that, for once, the misfortune befalls the other side.  It would make a nice change, we need a break from it all.

Vent over.

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