My husband’s ex is making ludicrous claims but the CSA will believe her
My husband had a relationship with a married woman 13 years ago. She said she was separated – but she wasn’t. She quickly became pregnant. Her husband wanted to keep the family together but she walked out on him, taking their two children. She claimed the baby was my husband’s and demanded that he provide a new home for her, the baby and her two older children. My husband wanted to do the right thing so he scraped together his savings and bought her a house and a car. He also helped her through her divorce and helped get her children into a new school. They agreed that he would pay her £650 a month in maintenance for the new baby – in the end he paid much more than this, covering all the household bills, the cost of a full-time au pair, holidays etc. He drew the line at moving in with her, as she was a nightmare, and lived in his own flat more than three hours away. Needless to say, the situation was unsustainable.
Her demands got bigger and bigger and my husband, who was nearing retirement, became more and more stressed about his ability to meet them. She threatened blackmail, she said she would go to his employers (a catholic college) and cause him to lose his job if he didn’t keep up payments, if he didn’t buy her handbags, perfume, make-up and so on. By this time all three children were in private school and the house had been completely refurbished, to the point of being fully air-conditioned. She even built a separate home-office complex in the garden. She got into the habit of spending 8 weeks at a time in Noosa, Australia, and started planning a course of cosmetic surgery… My husband lost patience and told her it all had to stop. He explained that in six months he would be scaling back his payments to £850 a month plus school-fees.
He said she could keep the house, the car and all the stuff. Her response:
1) Steal his credit-cards and bank-details and try to run up as much debt as possible.
2) Break into his flat and steal share-certificates, computers and anything valuable she could lay her hands on.
3) Prevent my husband having any contact with the girl he thought was his daughter.
4) Start a campaign on the internet seeking to discredit my husband and prevent him from working.
5) Steal my husband’s professional identity, setting herself up in the same line of work as him and telling all sorts of lies to get work she was unqualified to do.
She then, naturally enough, hired Heather McCartney’s lawyers in a bid to sue him for a lump-sum payment of over £300k (she won just 30k, though she spent £125k on lawyers in doing this) and then started CSA proceedings to boot. We have been in CSA Hell for more than 3 years now, never managing to get any sort of stable assessment. Because my husband was stupid enough to negotiate with her directly over maintenance and not to get a court order, it is as if he has paid nothing towards his daughter at all.
Every time the CSA make a calculation, she writes and claims that my husband owns houses he has never seen, has bank accounts in countries he has never visited and otherwise that he is making up to a million pounds a year. She has claimed that the CSA should assess all my assets and income as if it were his as well and that the CSA should assess him ow on earnings and assets that he might have had before he met her or that he might have in the future. The CSA is bound to take every ludicrous claim seriously, and each time they demand a full up-to-date declaration of income and assets, accompanied by a year’s worth of annotated bank-statements, full tax-returns, detailed accounts and sale notices and hundreds of other things from my husband, which takes days and days to compile. It is a damn sight more difficult to prove one’s innocence than it is to prove someone’s guilt. In this case all the burden of proof is on us and she is free to say and do whatever, with no comeback for making false allegations or timewasting. She is driving us both into an early grave with the constant paperwork and phone-calls. We can’t afford more legal help and there is no end in sight. She started writing anonymous letters against me, so I lost my job and then my business folded.
I now have two babies and spend all my time doing paperwork for the CSA, while my husband, now retired, goes out to work full-time to pay the maintenance bills which are still based on an assessment of his income while he was working. If you count school-fees as well as maintenance, that woman takes 70% of our household income after tax each month to sustain her “lifestyle”. Her daughter is dressed from oxfam and primark and looked after by anyone but her mother, when not at school. he is banned from speaking about, let alone to, her father. What is the justice in any of that?
12 thoughts on “My husband’s ex is making ludicrous claims but the CSA will believe her”
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What an evil nasy woman she is, ABSOLUTLEY DISUSTING. seems she is only out for herself, Another PWC whom only true goal is to financialy ruin another family,As for the csa all i can say is that they always side with the pwc, A change is needed in child support law, and any pwc whom is found to be fraudelent should be prosecuted for fraud.
You have been dealing with a bunny boiler by the sounds of it….. it is scary to say the least and this woman is clearly on a mission to get everything she can in everywhich way possible; there is scope for further 5 years of this….. however, you mention that your husband is forbidden from having contact with the daughter he “thought was his”, i don’t quite understand. If he is in doubt, you must request a DNA test asap, and sue this woman if you can establish deceit. Have you not tried to apply for contact through the court? Is the house still in your husband’s name, was the agreement for her to live in this house made verbally? in which case, i would request rent being paid as of now. Perhaps it is also time to share your ordeal with your MP and see what his/her advice would be with regards to your situation with the csa. Best wishes.
I feel for you, i dont know how women are allowed to get away with this sort of thing, the CSA as we all know favour women like her, she sounds like the biggest scumbag walking the earth and obviously cares not a jot for her daughter, has a DNA test actually been done? If not make sure you are paying for a child that is your husbands,secondly the CSA can only go from the dates of calculation, this is sometimes hard when the ex is always on the phone to them demanding money, All school fees that he has paid will be taken into account, the CSA have to do this, you need now to stop paying them, your husband and yourself are obviously not in a financial position to keep paying both, either one or the other, pay school fees or CSA, she cant have it both ways, she either takes whats owed to her which is CSA or she can get lost simple, dont let the CSA bully you, they are notorious for this, threats of all kinds, Your on the road to financail ruin if you let this carry on, personally im shocked your hubby has walked from his job, to prove a point that men and there second families have to pay the ultimate price, Good luck i really hope you sort this matter out,
have you reported her behaviour to police as its harassment?? with regards to assets its only income that’s used to make the assessments assets only come into play if there are arrears to be collected etc.
school fees can only be taken into account under a variation application if they are to cover boarding school costs
Yes Alice, you are right – and we can’t afford the 30k it would cost to send her boarding, even though it would be much better for her and would mean that the money we pay would definitely benefit her, rather than paying for her mother and older sisters’ shopping expeditions. If we commit now to boarding fees, that would mean another 8 years of 30k a year plus whatever bigger-than-inflation hikes the school comes up with. Given that my husband is 67 and we don’t have £240k in cash, we just can’t start down this road. At least with the CSA we have the faint hope that any real-terms drop in income or assets will mean a reduction in our liability…
As it is the school offered a discount for each of this woman’s 3 daughters, because they were siblings. She spoke to the bursar and persuaded him that the full discount should apply, but only against the older girls’ fees. They benefit from a discount which should be applied to my husband’s daughter – so he is now subsidizing her other children in this way as well. As he hasn’t got custody, the school won’t discuss the matter with us. Our only relevance is to pay the bills she racks up.
Amanda, I have always wanted to involve the police but have been persuaded not to by my husband. Actually, he makes sense. If she gets sent to prison for what she has done we end up having to move from one end of the country to the other to babysit all three of her daughters whilst she pays (who?) for her crimes. These children are in school and ours aren’t yet. Further, if she is fined she will just use this as another argument as to why my husband must contribute more to the costs of running the house – not through the CSA but by applying to the court. If she was fined her capital position would enable her to apply for legal-aid, whereas we would have to pay our own costs in defending the action. There is simply no come-back. She can do whatever she wants and unless the CSA regulations are changed to enable them to take into account a PWC’s past record in making spurious complaints and applications, we are in for the long-haul.
The CSA can only collect maintenance from the date the Alleged NRP is contacted, they cannot collect, nor take into account any money paid for maintenance prior to that date. The Agency will assess purely on the NRP’s income, although a variation can be applied for by the PWC if the NRP has assets over a certain amount. If the PWC applies for a variation the onus is on them to supply evidence to back up the application.
Hi Charlotte
My partner is the NRP and the CSA were a complete nightmare for us. Initially a member of staff WRONGLY told my partners ex (the PWC) that my income would be included in the assessment, when she realised this was not the case she made our lives hell. She hurt and upset her own children in an attempt to emotionally blackmail my partner into giving her more money (she very rarely spent the money on the kids but spent it on holidays with her friends, gym memberships etc and would send the kids round demanding money). My partner always paid her slightly more than the CSA suggested!
She lied to the CSA and told them my partner had huge wage increases and had changed jobs (all lies) but the CSA believed her (without checking with my partner or his employer) and my partner ended up in arrears!! We contacted our local MP who helped to get the arrears reduced (although they never should have been applied in the first place as his ex was lying)… for 2 and a half years we were walking wrecks waiting for the ex to cause trouble or the CSA to increase our payments without any reason or contact!! So my partner and I sad down and decided that we needed to sort the mess out once and for all (our relationship suffered do to the stress of having to deal with the CSA). Staff at the CSA were absolutely useless and we never got the same answer twice….
I found out from this website that joint assets could be sold to pay child maintenance arrears and/or any money owed to the CSA, so my parnter and I decided to sell up and put everything into my name. I sold my flat and the house we both owned and we bought a house in my name only. He asked to be made redundant from his job so that he could return to full time education so that CSA payments to the PWC were reduced to the minimum (£5 per week) and 4 months later we (and the kids) have never been happier. Instead of the PWC getting £400 per month she gets £20 and we spend the rest on the kids 🙂 They love going shopping with their Dad now as he has money to spend as opposed to him forever telling them how skint he was. I have a good salary that can afford us a good lifestyle and we have a stress free life with less problems from his ex and minimal contact from CSA (they cant get what HE the NRP doesn’t have and they can’t touch what I, the NRPP have :-)).
My advice to you would be that you should try to find a way to keep your partners assets down (and income if possible) and the CSA will lose interest in yous (hopefully the ex will too)!
And contrary to Alices ‘advice’ that the PWC will need to supply evidence to support their application for a variation… this is 100% wrong… in our case, 3 times the PWC contacted the CSA WITHOUT evidence (because she was lying!) and 3 times the amount my partner paid changed – without any contact from the CSA! Alice may provide you with the ‘rules’ but in practice the staff at the CSA do not always apply them… they are a law unto themselves and are lazy!!!
Be careful with the CSA, they do not have anyones best interests at heart…
If a PWC makes an application for a variation in respect of assets held by the NRP it they must provide evidence of the assets they claim the NRP owns. If an assessment is done on an NRP’s income and this is incorrect the NRP has 1 month from the assessment to appeal the decision and provide evidence to show that their income is.
Hi Alice,
I know that’s the theory but, in my experience, things don’t work that way. If the PWC applied for a variation on the basis that the NRP has assets that haven’t been declared they are free to make allegations without evidence, which will then be followed up by the CSA requesting proof that what the PWC says is NOT the case. If the appeal reader says that there is no grounds to support the variation requested by the PWC, the PWC is also free to appeal that decision, which triggers another round of requests for proof that the original allegation is untrue. The allegation can bounce forwards and backwards, with no evidence at all, for 18 months until it reaches the top tier tribunal, which makes a final request for evidence – you guessed it, from the NRP that the PWC’s claim is NOT correct. The burden of evidence is always on the NRP, regardless of what the regulations say, if the PWC is willing and able to make enough noise and persist.
Also, the standard of evidence required is very low. The tirbunal has been willing to look at photocopies of printouts of Word documents which the PWC claims support her case. We have never seen these documents before and she refuses to account for where or how she obtained them, or provide the “originals” or hard-drives etc. She is basically free to write letters/e-mails etc. on her PC, print out the results and mail them to the CSA as “evidence” in her case. If such “evidence” worked in other contexts then perhaps I could get a job as the next Archbishop of Canterbury…
Hi Sally,
I certainly sympathize with your case. I am so glad you are now able to spend the money on the kids and not the PWC’s gym membership. It does, however, seem a bit ridiculous that regulations designed to protect childrens’ interests financially lead to one parent being forced out of work and his assets signed away.
I have resisted my husband’s requests to have the house registered in my sole name because I think it is horribly unfair and I don’t want him to be in that position, should (God forbid) anything happen in our relationship.
I wish I was able to go back to work and bring in a bit of stable income that wasn’t subject to the CSA – but sadly anything I try is destroyed by the PWC’s campaign of writing vicious anonymous letters, notwithstanding I have a six-month-old baby and no money for the level of childcare I would need if I went out to work full-time for somebody else. I got no maternity pay, not even SMP, and had to return to working less than 48 hours after giving birth.
Incidentally, I have just lost the £1700 a year child benefit for my two children, because my husband’s gross earnings are about £10 over the threshold, when the PWC is able to claim for three children, plus nearly £1800 a month in other tax-credits and benefits, not to mention the maintenance money. Given that we both make about the same from part-time work, this is a good example of the unfairness of the governments’ system, penalizing married women with babies to pay wodges of cash to the single mothers of multiple teenagers by multiple fathers on benefits.
Also, I have been told that after 2015 I will probably lose the 15 hours free childcare that my youngest would have had at 3-4 years old, unless I go out to work for somebody else, which will probably still be problematic for the poison pen reason.
Also, the new HMRC real-time PAYE reporting creates another week’s work in the month for our business, meaning that we have still less time to earn money and yet more pointless admin for the government, reducing profits – but given that the profits are joint, not by quite enough to impact on child benefit. Hey ho.
Politicians really know how to screw up peoples’ lives don’t they. Why can’t they just butt out? They try to help one set of people and the result is almost always that EVERYBODY ends up losing out. The mountain of paperwork and stupid laws that are created makes life not worth living.