United Future

Posted at 2008-04-13 03:43:39.439. Permalink.

As a paying Dad that loves his children, it hurts me how much the system takes out of my pay. It takes money that I would rather spend on MY children,and not some one elses.

The mother of my children earns more than me, and is with a new partner that earns good money. Combining their incomes together is quite a sum of money.

I do not have a grudge against this - good on them. But why is it that every time I get ahead and earn more money - jut so that I can provide a more comfortable place for my children - that I only see every 2nd weekend - I get stung by IRD??

I'm not 100% sure of this but:

By IRD equations, my living allowance is approx 46% of my income.
Out of the other 54% is taken 24% for child support (2 children), tax , etc.

So out of every $100
I am supposed to live on $46??
less tax
less GST on everything I buy
fuel gone up
Rent gone up
Food gone up

Come on!!
Please increase the living allowance percentage for Dads paying child support.

Posted at 2008-04-14 12:19:39.436. Permalink.

I'd like to see our politicians exist on an allowance of less than $14000 a year before tax and less than $5000 for their wives or partners.
Peter Dunne has sat by for years and has not been concerned about changes being made to the child support scheme,so why has he waited until election year to voice his concerns?
Could it be that he is "running with the hare and hunting with the hounds" in election year.

Posted at 2008-04-15 18:48:24.414. Permalink.

Actually Peter is taking advantage of the fact that as Minister of Revenue he can get the background work done that would be needed to get cabinet to agree to change. This doesn't guarantee him a breakthrough because cabinet are not always easy to convince... but don't shoot him down for trying.

The last time child support issues were improved was 1996 (Guess who was Minister of Revenue back then ??? .... yep Hon Peter Dunne)

Posted at 2008-04-15 20:35:41.705. Permalink.

I totally agree with the comments made here. I'm in the same situation with not being able to afford the child support I've been assessed to pay. I have two children living with me that will be penalised for the money I have to spend to support chidren I hardly ever see. My wife and I may have to sell the house we're in and live on rice, if anything. The ideal situation would be to get 50/50 access to my children and no one pays child support - I've been down the family court track before - twice (What a waste of time that was).
I'd rather pay to support the children and look after them at the same time). I've even received a text message saying that my daughter is dead to me - yet the mother is happy to see me financially ruined. It's time to do something about this farse.
As with comments made - who can live on the tiny allowance they give you?
My feeling is - if one parent wants 100% custody they should pay 100% of the expenses. I want 50/50 custody and no child support.

Posted at 2008-04-17 16:33:16.224. Permalink.

You can see I have lost faith in politicians Judy.
Empty promises are all we are given.
I don't think I'll bother to vote in the next elections because there is not one party that I have any confidence in anymore.
Peter may try to get changes made to the child support act,but as you said,cabinet are
not always easy to convince.
With Helen and Judith he hasn't got alot of hope.
They're not exactly men friendly.
The whole act needs to be scraped and started all over again.
The IRD should not be involved at all unless the liable parents refuse to contribute towards child support.
Voluntary agreements could easily be set up between both parents with the help of a mediator if need be and leave the IRD right out of it.
leave them to do the job that they are supposed to be doing,which is revenue collecting,and not using children for financial gains.
Children are not revenue.Sadly many custodial parents(usually mothers)think that they are today.
An added benefit would be that the IRD staff could be reduced considerably,with only the most competent staff remaining.
Which would result in less costs for the country and less MISTAKES.

Posted at 2008-04-17 17:17:42.08. Permalink.

Carol, politics is the art of the achievable. You are right to question the hollowness of promises made.

Party policy is really about the goals you believe the country should be moving towards and then in the reality of an MMP environment you push for any movement in that direction knowing full well that you rarely get everything you want.

UnitedFuture supports shared care arrangements for all the reasons given by bloggers like yourself.

You are right that we can't guarantee cabinet will agree to any proposed changes Peter puts forward, but for him, sitting back and doing nothing would be worse than trying and failing.

Sometimes we can a strike a compromise deal to get at least some movement in the right direction. Incremental change is better than no change at all and we will continue to push for change to child support.

I am sorry you feel so disillusioned with politicians and hope that you will take up the chance to exercise your democratic right to vote in the up-coming election. Thanks for your comments to date.

Posted at 2008-04-20 19:28:07.491. Permalink.

Peter is the minister of inland revenue and he needs to do something about that department immediately.
Most liable parents don't mind paying child support,but when they are forced to make double payments,once through a private agreement and secondly through the IRD,there is most definitely something very wrong with their system.
They will say to go through an admin review to recover one set of payments,but then they will hit you with section 206,which reads in their exact words....
"Direct payment to payee.
Where a payee has received,from a person who in relation to that payee is a liable person,an amount intended by both the liable person and the payee to be paid in complete or partial satisfaction of a liability of the liable person to pay financial support under this Act,the Commissioner shall disregard that payment for the purposes of this Act and the amount so paid shall not be credited by the Commissioner against the liability of the liable person to pay financial support under this Act"
I hope you can make some sense of that Act Judy because I most certainly can't.
How foolish it was of me to think that the Mafia existed only in Italy.

Posted at 2009-08-18 09:12:20.945. Permalink.

There are always two sides to a story. My partner has two children. I now pay for everything as the father of the children is able to hide his income within the company he owns. We know he has considerable assets and continues to purchase cars, boats, investment property but tells IRD that he has only made about $25k for the year. This amount in itself wouldn't even cover the mortgage payments. It is so obvious the administrative review officers almost admit it. Child Support is unable to audit his accounts, he doesn't have to provide any information and he can lie and get away with it.

I understand that some fathers are unable to afford child support payments but I do believe the current method is correct other than it needs to be able to be enforced.

In regards to what My Dunne is looking to do can someone please tell me why the new partner should have to pay for everything and the father can get away with it simply because the new partner has a healthy income. What will simply happen is that the new partner will hide their income too - as far as the IRD will be concerned anyway. It will only punish the honest people again.

Where is the responsibility of the father? Will this not drive bigger wedges between all the parties?

Posted at 2009-10-30 22:14:30.0. Permalink.

The system is not fair. It does not take into account many things. On the one hand the IRD state that they have no interest in your parental access rights and then on the other they state that you must be a responsible parent and pay for the care of your child. The parent, almost always a woman, who is the beneficiary of money paid is not assessed on her own income which no bearing on the paying parents contribution. What she does with the money received is of no interest to the IRD - so much for rattling on about being responsible. I am a paying parent if you haven't guessed already. The IRD constantly makes mistakes in its appraisals and then demands that I rectify them at the drop of a hat. They charge interest if you are one day late and there are no graces or tolerance to that end which often just exacerbates the problem. When my marriage ended I took nothing.

Posted at 2009-10-30 22:15:54.149. Permalink.

Part 2
I did not get 50% of anything. She got the car, the furniture and everything other than the clothes that I owned. She demanded that I return MY collection of DVD's and CD's which she had NO interest in or she would sue me for them. I gifted them to my children. I took no memorabilia after 20 years of marriage I had nothing to show for it. She got it all. I was paying $1200 a month to her. She wanted more. She went to the IRD to get more. They dropped it back to $946 a month. I won round 1 at her own doing but I barely could afford it all the same. Having been in and out of work the IRD takes none of this into account. My immediate circumstances are not of concern to them. They only work on an annual amount. My income over two years has been erratic. I live with extremes and have to pay back money I take from credit to survive the months where there is no income. She and the IRD cut me no slack. The review system sucks and takes too long for someone struggling in the immediate situation. The demands keep coming. If I want to contest my financial situation I have to declare all my outgoings and I have no right to privacy as far as the ex is concerned either, as my details are passed willingly by the IRD to my ex spouse. What happened to privacy laws? Where does she get the right to see what I earn and spend it on and does she have to submit her income and outgoings statement? Not on your Nelly!

Posted at 2009-10-30 22:19:04.538. Permalink.

Part 3
If you think I don't care for my daughter well you are wrong. I support my two older kids who have left home as they need in less materialistic ways but at a personal cost to me. It is interesting that since they left the clutches of their mother and the IRD they are more approachable and interested in what I can do for them or who I am.

Posted at 2009-10-30 22:19:31.876. Permalink.

Part 4
The system is geared to punish the parent that has no say in the child's upbringing, gets no view of the child's progress at school and has no visitation rights. I think if the paying parent is happy to pay what they deem reasonable and it is not too far removed from the norm then the IRD should distance itself from getting involve. Otherwise frankly it looks like they are thugs getting their jolleys off at the expense of someone else's misery.

Posted at 2009-10-30 22:20:00.986. Permalink.

Part 5
I haven't bought clothes in two years. I have two shattered teeth and missing fillings. I have a heart murmur that demands that teeth are kept in good order to prevent the failure of the affected valve through bacteria entering the blood stream via the mouth - the cost is so prohibitive that I cannot afford to fix them. Some weeks my groceries are down to a mere $20 because that is all I can spare. I made the mistake of using American Express to pay for some of my payments to the IRD. Now the IRD take precedent in payments and AMEX are put on a back burner so AMEX ring me relentlessly if I am so much as one day late and charge me an additional $30 a month in penalties. I have borrowed $26000 from family to keep me afloat and pay the creditors that I inherited from the marriage break up. I have an overdraft that exceeds what I earn a week. My credit cards are maxed out to $11500 and I have no hope of paying these back soon. This is thanks to the fair IRD.

Posted at 2009-10-30 22:20:16.06. Permalink.

Part 6
The ex lives debt free. My money pays much of her rent and she has an excellent paying job as a bank manager but this is of no interest to the IRD. Mr Dunn...You said reforms to make this more equitable were submitted in April 2008. I have five years of this misery and a fight with the IRD who claim I underpaid them in July when I have proved otherwise. The IRD will not even look at their own documentation. So WHEN does this become fair for all concerned??? Cheers mate. It is all smoke and mirrors from where I sit. I've even had to take a five year holiday from kiwisaver because it helps put petrol in the car each week to get to work.

Posted at 2009-10-31 22:52:36.564. Permalink.

Hi Roger
Women are always thought of as being 'disadvantaged' when it comes to child support issues.But I've seen a selfish woman who would never let her children have a birthday party even though her and her husband were earning between them almost $90,000 a year.But when they seperated and after he met me it was a different story.She claimed costs for everything that she wouldn't let her children go to before they seperated.Art classes,music classes,Kip McGrath classes etc.And she wanted to take them to places that she would never take them to when she was married.She also wanted two lots of child support payments.One through private payments and the other through the IRD. And she got her own way for a while.
We've gone through the system that you have gone through too.With not enough money to exist on from week to week while she has become fatter and fatter.
Like you my husband got almost nothing when they seperated.She got half of his superannuation even though she wasn't with him all the time he'd been paying into it,then she wanted money from the sale of my house.Then she told him that he was just a sperm donor.
We've had to move well away from where she lives so we can be free to live again.

Posted at 2009-11-15 10:16:42.278. Permalink.

Re: Jason Steed, This simply demonstrates that the Act lacks the mechanism for assesing "capacity to pay". Using the Tax Act for child support assesment purposes is a bit of a subversion of the object of the act that requires assesmnet of Child Support according to a parent's capacity to pay.
The Child Support act as legislation in fact fails to meet many of its own objects, but even if the law is workable, the culture of the IRD and Family Court would seem to be such that the law is interpreted in ways that do not primarily favour the children but rather pander to the feudalistic nature of family break down.

Posted at 2009-12-04 18:37:23.03. Permalink.

There is more than one way to skin a cat. I am in a relationship with a man who has 2 children to a previous relationship. We raise my daughter together and raise our son together. When I met my partner, he had separated from his wife because from what I have seen and heard I can only ascertain that she thought the grass was greener on the other side. Initially he(My partner and her had a rather amicable agreement in relation to their children. This was because she was recieving the DPB and he was giving her money at her request because assumedly she was struggling to support the boys on the DPB. He was paying $238 in child support payments, doing maintenance around her home and looking after the children on the weekends. She was on a good wicket. When he met me he was no longer able to give her extra money over and above his child support obligations. She became very upset with this situation and eventually started withholding the children from him until he started showing that he cared for them(He supposedly didn't care for them because he could no longer afford to give her extra money over and above his child support obligations. The next thing he knew, he was being served with a protection order accused of all sorts of disgusting things including vulgar untruths about me(She doesn't even know me), 1000's of dollars in legal fees trying to protect his good name, her being rewarded with full day to day care of the children for her lies, continual harrassment of us, Struggling to cope financially and still having to financially support his children for weekends, holidays e.t.c, all the while still having to pay child support. We decided that enough was enough!!! We worked out that the system does not reward one for being hard working and a loving parent, They reward those who have their hand out for benefits all the while getting to enjoy the quality time off raising their children.You guessed it.... We are now on a benefit and we are living alot more comfortably than we were before and guess what? The courts have now awarded my partner more access than he had before, and are looking at giving him more custody sometime next year!!!!... Moral of the story.....Why work to contribute to keep the country running, When you only get punished!!!! Wake up politicians and do something about the CHILD SUPPORT SCHEME. It is unfair. Why don't the politcians look at the scheme that Australia has in place. It is alot fairer.

Posted at 2009-12-29 20:32:29.373. Permalink.

The system is there to protect everyone

Posted at 2010-02-24 18:33:48.592. Permalink.

jayne jayne said "The system is there to protect everyone"

Sadly that is not correct jayne jayne.
Some paying parents are able to dodge their child support commitments through hiding their incomes in trusts like the high income tax dodgers.
Some custodial parents 'use' the IRD and their children for sheer greed
eg: Double dipping in CS payments
(one payment paid privately)
Some men are paying CS for children who are not their children. A woman only has to name the father and the IRD accept her word as gospel.
Shared care should be exactly that. No CS support payments should exchange hands. Once again some children are being 'used' for profit.
On top of all this, most of IRD's staff are so untrained that they have absolutely no idea of what they are talking about.
The system is a shambles.

Posted at 2010-02-24 19:37:32.524. Permalink.

When I was a young mother, I received no child support from my ex husband for our children at all and it was a struggle.
Now I am married to a man who is being crucified by the IRD.
I believe that I am more qualified to sort this system out than any of our politicians are because I have lived in the real world where most of our politicians don't know exists.