Justice Minister Andrew Swan announced today that legislation and regulations improving Manitoba’s Child Support Recalculation Service are now in effect.
“Child support payments can now be recalculated more efficiently to reflect the amount that should be paid, so custodial parents don’t have to keep going back to court,” said Swan. “Changes we have made to the Family Maintenance Act and regulations now mean that child support orders that are part of the program can be recalculated whether or not a paying parent provides updated financial information.”
Changes to the Family Maintenance Act and regulation assume that a parent’s income increased if they fail to provide requested income information on a timely basis. Depending on how long it has been since that most recent reassessment, income increases are deemed to range from 10 to 30 per cent. Future recalculations are based on the deemed income amount any time a parent fails to disclose their actual income.
If a parent whose order is subject to recalculation fails to provide information about the amount of special or extraordinary expenses, those expenses will be deemed to be zero.
Recalculations will now be tied to the anniversary date of the child support order, with the first recalculation on the first anniversary and subsequent recalculations every two years after that. At least 75 per cent of cases currently with the service have support-paying parents who are regularly employed and, in most cases, annual recalculations result in minimal changes to the amount of child support.
Manitoba’s Child Support Recalculation Service was created in 2005 to allow a parent to have support payments recalculated regularly without having to spend time and money on complicated court processes. It currently handles about 2,600 cases per year.
