Children maintenance

Child maintenance includes most of day-to-day care of the child such as:

• Clothes,
• Housing,
• Scholarship fees,
• Food,
• School bills.

Other expenses will be qualified as exceptional and won’t be included into the child maintenance calculation.

Exceptional expenses are not predictable and one-time-based. These expenses can not be fixed by the Courts and must be based on a mutual agreement.

Here are some examples:

• Days and nights-out,
• Driving licence test,
• Private school scholarship fees,
• School and linguistic trips,
• Non-refundable medical fees,
• Childcare centre fees.

Expenses covered in scholarship have to be included such as sport or artistic practises, but also international trips.

Those expenses are not common but still necessary for your child’s mental health and wellness. Both parents are sharing those expenses depending on their earns.

1st part : day-to-day needs

As the French Law, child maintenance is money to help pay for your child’s living costs such as:

• Clothing
• Food
• Housing

2^nd part : extra expenses coverage

Regarding the Common Law, expenses covered in scholarship are not included in child maintenance but can be, if both parents can get to an arrangement.

Regarding the US Law, expenses included in the child support can change between the States. Some states mention that dental and medical fees must be included into child support whereas some don’t. When some unusual expenses are not included in the child support amount, an agreement is possible between both partners.

Most of the time, child maintenance can be paid by direct debit or bank transfer or BACS. Payment terms are determined by the Court.

Child maintenance can also look like as:

• Direct payments for your child expenses,
• Payments managed by a third-party company in charge of paying your child’s a pension (set of monthly payments based on a rate),
• Properties ownership for instance,
• Getting your child some properties generating incomes.

If your child maintenance is overdue or you’ve got arrears, you must get a family law lawyer who will advise you on how to recover overdue payments and arrears.

If the arrangement broke down, you must do as follow:

• Send a recorded letter to recover the arrears;
• Remind the paying parent of his duties in this letter and ask for the arrears as well as the recovering process;
• You could also contact the Child maintenance recovery agency;
• You can also get an enforcement and debt recovery agency. This process allows you to get overdue payments taken from your ex-partner’s bank account.
• Getting a Court judgment.

4 ways of collecting your overdue payments:

• Direct payment process
• Caisse d’Allocations Familiales recovery help services. CAF is the french government family pension agency
• Enforcement and debt recovery agencies
• Government financial services through a crown prosecutor (called public prosecutor in French)

Processes and terms are detailed in the following questions.

The recovery payment process is about to get child maintenance payments and arrears through a third-party services (employer, banks).

This recovery process can be on future or the last 6 months overdue payments.

According to French law L213-1 à L213-6 and R213-1 à R213-10 articles, this way of getting your arrears is possible when the amount has been set up by Courts.

The recovery process can start from the first overdue payment (one day behind schedule).

How it works:

• The parent who has to get the payments can ask a legal officer to collect the arrears. This legal officer has 8 days to notify the overdue payments to the third-party.
• This third-party must reply within 8 days following the notice. He must advise if he can pay or not.
• To avoid a 1500 euros fine, this third-party must stick to the payments schedule.

A direct payment can be challenged in Courts.

According to the French law L581-1 à L581-10 and R581-2 à R581-9 articles, this way of collecting arrears and payments is only if you have a minor child.

For this to be possible, the owning parent has to meet the following conditions:

• Has a Court decision setting up the child maintenance amount

• Do not get any child support from the French family pension services

• Started a legal arrears collection process

If these conditions are met, the owning parent has to fill in and send a recovery arrears form.

The director in charge of the family pension services will list all the arrears. He can also make advanced payments to the owning parent on top of the paying parent payments.

With the owning parent agreement, the director can also recover arrears from the debtor as per the child day-to-day and education costs.

The process is as following : the paying parent makes direct payments to the French family pension services instead of paying the owning parent. That government branch will then repay the ownin parent the next working day after the payment has been made (French law 373-2-2 and L582-1 articles).

This process can apply whether the payment is overdue or not.

For this process to be applied you will need a Court decision fixing the amount of the child maintenance.

Since the 1st of March 2022, this process is automatically set-up once the Court agrees on the divorce consent order.

This arrangement can be cancelled if:

• Both parents don’t agree on this arrangement,
• Courts decide on another way to collect the arrears following the paying parent’s financial circumstances (French law 373-2-2 Code civil article).

This process allows government accountability services to collect child maintenance arrears instead of the owning parent ( French law L161-3 et R161-1 articles).

For this process to be set-up the owning parent must prove he has followed a private process collection and payments are still in arrears.

This process can be on future or last 6 months overdue payments.

How it works? the owning parent sends this public recovery order to the crown or public local prosecutor.

The prosecutor will then establish an enforcement order which will be filed to the right government services to recover all the arrears. In case of a dispute, the Court will then decide.

Once the owning parent sent the consent form for a public recovery process, no further action is needed or can be taken.

In the UK

There are 3 different ways to arrange child maintenance. Some people arrange maintenance voluntarily with each other, others have maintenance calculated and collected under a government scheme and some have arrangements made by a court order.

In the UK, there are 2 different ways to collect maintenance arrears:

• If you had a private arrangement which has broken down: You can ask the CMS to arrange payments. You will need to call CMO and they will explain how you can get maintenance. You can also ask the CMS to collect maintenance and pay it to you. You and the paying parent will have to pay a fee to use Collect and Pay.
• If the other parent doesn’t agree to repay arrears:

The CMS can try to get the arrears from the other parent’s earnings, benefits, or bank or building society account. This process looks alike the French one.

If that doesn’t clear off the arrears, the CMS can apply to court for a ‘liability order’. This means they can ask bailiffs to take goods from the other parent and sell them.

If the other parent owns their home, the CMS can also ask a court for an order to sell it. The CMS can use any money raised to pay off the arrears.

In the USA :

In the USA, the Child Support Enforcement Act allows district attorneys and state attorneys to get child maintenance arrears. They are also entitled to give fines to the Debtor as taking away the other parent’s passport or driving licence, sending them to prison or sending bailiffs to collect assets and belongings.

The process begins when you apply for child support services or when your local child support office receives a referral from another public assistance program. Then your local child support office works to find the other parent, legally formalize parentage, set the order, and route the collected funds to the parent owed support.

When the parent doesn’t pay the full amount or doesn’t pay at all, your child support agency enforces the child support order. Other enforcement methods might include withholding child support from unemployment or worker’s compensation benefits, intercepting income tax refunds, and reporting delinquent child support payments to credit bureaus.

Every state is different, so contact your family law lawyer to learn more about the process as it applies to your case.

The Uniform Interstate Family Support Act allows you to get a Court enforcement order even if the debtor lives in another state.