Advice on child support

Tess is a former Contract Decision Maker for Child Support and can provide information about how your mediated agreements will work in with your Child Support obligations. She can advice you about what Child Support covers, and what it doesn’t cover.

Tess from Argyll had a recent fantastic success for a Dad paying Child Support. Dad was concerned that Mum was not declaring extra income she was receiving from her ‘side hustle’. He was paying nearly $2,000 each month in Child Support and he thought it was unfair that the amount he was paying was based on her incorrect income.

Tess assisted Dad to collect evidence that Mum’s side hustle was a booming business, not just a hobby. Mum had declared to Child Support that her income was $19,000 per annum from her employment and didn’t declare her income from her side hustle business. The result was that Child Support staff increased Mum’s income to $97,000 per annum. This meant Dad had OVERPAID by about $1,800. The new Child Support assessment will be in place for 12 months.

Is Child Support using the wrong figures to calculate your Child Support? It doesn’t matter of you are the paying parent or the receiving parent, Tess has experience working for Child Support in reviewing assessments and could help you to get a fairer assessment.

You can estimate your Child Support payments here: Basic child support formula – Child support assessment – Services Australia

How does Child Support work when a child moves between parents’ homes?

The Guide to Social Security Law (‘the Guide’) provides guidance on how to determine percentage of care.

The Guide sets out the following considerations to determine the extent to which a person is caring for a child:

• To what extent the person has control of the child, including having overall responsibility for the child and making major decisions relating to who the child spends time with and the child’s health, education, discipline, recreational and/or social activities, and  arrangements for others to meet the needs of the child.
• To what extent the person meets the needs of the child by providing the child with accommodation, clothing, food, child care, education, health care, emotional support, supervision, transport and extra-curricular activities.
• To what extent the person pays for the costs of meeting the needs of the child.
• To what extent the person otherwise provides financial support for the child. To what extent the child provides for his or her own needs or has those needs met from another source.
• To what extent the child is financially independent or financially supported from another source.
• Percentage of care is also considered with respect to who has responsibility for making arrangements for, and decisions about, the child’s welfare, as well as who is meeting the child’s costs, rather than just the accommodation arrangements themselves.

The evidence for this comes from the parents themselves and the Child Support staff ask each parent. Children are not involved in this discussion.

What this means for you: get a clear parenting agreement that both of you will comply with so expectations are clear and disputes avoided.

Full and frank disclosure

From time to time, I blog about Child Support because of the close association it has with parenting mediation.

In a recent Child Support case, a father “failed to provide full and frank disclosure as to his income, property, and financial resources” and the judge made her own findings as to his income. The father appealed the decision. The mother sought to recover the costs of that appeal (because she was forced to defend). The father lost the appeal and then incurred the mother’s costs as well as his own.

It is important to make full and frank disclosure of income, property, and financial resources for the purposes of Child Support because, if your evidence is not “full and frank”, you might get a decision you’re not happy with.