Child Maintenance Service (CMS)

3. Mr T complains that because CMS used incorrect earnings for him and failed to rectify this during his 2022 annual review, he has been overpaying maintenance. He says he is also being charged fees to collect a debt he disputes he accrued.

4. He says this has caused him to experience extreme financial difficulties including unnecessary debt and a loss of Pension Credits. Mr T also says the matter has caused him frustration, anxiety and the breakdown of family relationships. He adds that he has been unable to work since.

5. Mr T wants the overpayment of maintenance and fees to be returned to him, an apology, a change in process and for CMS to make up his lost Pension Credits and pay him financial compensation.

6. Mr T has children for whom he is required to pay child maintenance. In April 2021, his income was limited to his pension but in July he got a part-time job. The first three months of that job required him to work full-time while he completed training but would then drop down to ad-hoc part-time hours.

7. CMS completed its standard annual review of Mr T’s liability in March 2022. Mr T says it incorrectly based the sum due on a full-time wage plus his pension income. Mr T told CMS that his income was incorrect and asked for a Mandatory Reconsideration (MR) to be undertaken. An MR is the first stage in the appeal process available for all CMS calculation decisions.

8. The MR was successful, and, in May, CMS wrote to Mr T and told him it had adjusted his income and backdated this to March (the point of his annual review). CMS arranged to collect both Mr T’s ongoing maintenance liability plus a payment towards arrears on his account via his salary. This is known as a Deductions from Earnings Order (DEO).

9. The maximum amount a DEO can be for is 40% of the parent’s take-home pay, meaning they have ‘protected earnings’ of 60% of their pay. The sum that was meant to be taken by DEO exceeded the protected earnings threshold so Mr T was paying less than he should have been.

10. Mr T reported that he was experiencing financial difficulties so in August CMS agreed to collect the arrears on his account over four years. It sent a revised DEO to his employer to this effect.

11. In August 2024, Mr T had a Tribunal hearing. This was in respect of the March 2022 annual review decision. The judge refused his appeal and upheld the decision CMS had made about this. Mr T had also wanted to dispute the arrears on the account as well as the amount of maintenance he had been required to pay from the 2021 annual review. The judge was unable to comment on the arrears or find any evidence of Mr T having disputed the 2021 calculation.

14. The Parliamentary Commissioner Act, 1967 (the law) says we cannot investigate a complaint where a person has (or had) the option to take legal action, unless we consider this is (or was) unreasonable in the circumstances. Additionally, the law tells us we cannot investigate a complaint which has already been considered by the courts.

15. The Child Support Maintenance Calculation Regulations underpins CMS’ actions. Part 4, Chapter 1.34 says that the income CMS should use to calculate how much maintenance is due is determined ‘on the basis of either historic income or current income’. It goes on to explain that historic information should be used unless there is no historic income information available, or that income is nil. When a calculation is made, CMS gets any available historic income information from HMRC.

16. Where a parent thinks their maintenance liability is incorrect, whatever the reason for this, there is a specific appeal route available to challenge this. This is initially to request an MR followed by referral to the First Tier and then Upper Tier Tribunals.

17. Mr T appealed the March 2022 annual review recalculation. This was amended at MR, and a judge was satisfied within a First Tier Tribunal hearing that there was no further basis for appeal. This was the correct way for Mr T to challenge CMS’ calculations. Because a judge made a decision in respect of this part of Mr T’s claim, the law says we cannot consider it further. We appreciate this will be disappointing for Mr T.

18. Mr T has linked his complaint about arrears on his account to action CMS took in 2021. He had the option to appeal that year’s annual review decision (or any earlier or later one) at the time it was made, in the same way as he did the 2022 annual review. This would first be via MR and then a tribunal if he was still unhappy with the decision. There is no evidence this was done.

19. We asked Mr T about this and queried why he had not done this at the time. He told us that he could not appeal the 2021 calculations because he only received these in 2022. We raised this with CMS and received details of the contact it had with Mr T in 2021.

20. CMS sent Mr T an annual review notice in March 2021. This explained his liability for three children for the next 12 months. We are confident he received this because he contacted CMS via his online portal two days later to advise that his eldest child was no longer in full-time education. CMS sent Mr T a revised maintenance calculation as a result, reducing his liability to be for two children rather than three. We are satisfied that Mr T received this decision also as he contacted CMS via the portal two days later to question it. CMS responded by reducing Mr T’s liability.

21. Mr T notified CMS of his employment in August and in October it sent a new maintenance decision to him increasing his liability significantly. Because this was backdated to August, arrears were created from this point. This decision was sent to the same address as the previous correspondence, and it would seem Mr T received it. This is because we can see he communicated with CMS via the portal at the start of December (he would have needed to have accessed his account, where this information would be shown, to have contacted CMS in this way).

22. He then sent CMS several payslips later than month. When it asked what the purpose of this information was and explained how he could report a change, he responded to say they were to show he was not earning a full-time wage. There is nothing to suggest he reported the change as CMS instructed.

23. If Mr T had not received the October decision until March 2022 along with his annual review, we would expect him to have raised this with CMS. We have not seen anything to suggest he did that.

24. CMS’ documentation makes it clear that there is a specific route for parents to follow to dispute a calculation along with the timescale for doing this. We find Mr T could have acted to challenge the 2021 calculations, and we have not seen any good reason why he did not do this. While we recognise such action is time consuming, this is the correct process to follow. Therefore, in accordance with the law, we will not consider this aspect of his complaint further.

1. We have carefully considered Mr T’s complaint about CMS. We are sorry to hear about the problems he has experienced with the calculation of his child maintenance liabilities.

2. Mr T had a legal route of appeal open to him to challenge the income CMS used to calculate his maintenance liability in 2021 and 2022. He used this for the 2022 decision, but not for 2021. We have not seen a strong enough reason why Mr T did not do this, so we cannot consider it further.