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Summary of Selected Cases
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SECURITY
Errors and delays in the payment of child support maintenance
Matters considered:
Mrs K complained that she suffered financial loss due to errors and delays by the Child Support Agency (CSA) of the Department of Social Security in their handling of her application for child support maintenance (CSM), and that they failed to keep her informed of developments in her case.
Summary of case
Mrs K applied for CSM for her child in November 1993 at which time she was claiming family credit, and a court order for child maintenance was in force. CSA took six months before sending the absent parent (AP) a maintenance enquiry form (MEF) in May 1994. In 1994 the AP moved house on several occasions. CSA imposed a punitive interim maintenance assessment (IMA) in October 1994 but could not be sure that the AP had received CSA's correspondence. (The IMA was later shown to have been invalid as, acting in the mistaken belief that no court order existed, CSA had ascribed to it the wrong effective date.) By March 1995 Mrs K had still received no CSM and CSA imposed a deduction from earnings order (DEO) against the AP's employer, only to cancel it four days later when they realised that the court order for child maintenance remained in force. Two months then passed before CSA wrote to the court asking them to cancel the court order, and another month before they imposed a further DEO in June 1995. They received one payment under that DEO in July, but then cancelled it when they realised that the IMA was invalid. CSA then wrote to the court returning to them jurisdiction over child maintenance for Mrs K's child from 24 October 1994. In December 1995 the AP returned a completed MEF but before CSA could make a full maintenance assessment Mrs K decided to withdraw her application to CSA and to pursue child maintenance through the courts.
Findings
CSA handled Mrs K's application very badly. They initially delayed sending a MEF to the AP, made a fundamental error in calculating the effective date of the IMA causing it to be invalid, and then imposed DEOs which had to be cancelled. In the two years during which they had responsibility for the case CSA secured only one CSM payment for Mrs K.
Remedy
The former Deputy Chief Executive of CSA apologised for the errors and delays which CSA had made in dealing with Mrs K's application and for their failure to keep Mrs K better informed of events. CSA made ex gratia payments totalling £5,077.07 to compensate her for CSM forgone.
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