Late or Missed Payments

 
#childsupport #CMS #childmaintenance #childsupport2023 What happens When the Child Maintenance Service Are Told Payments Are Late

Hello, how are you doing my name's Keith and I'm a dad, and I pay child maintenance through the Child Maintenance Service. So I thought today, I would talk to you about what happens when someone reports that you haven't paid, and what happens next. In order to report a missed payment, the CMS system does not allow reporting of missed / late payments until three working days have passed. This changed in November 2023. Prior top that it was a minimum of 5 working days. So if you're due to pay on a Friday, then the following Wednesday, if you haven't paid it can get reported, so if you're paying parent you can make after 3 working days. What happens next is the CMS will send a text message to the last known phone number that they have, and it will say, somewhere along the lines of, it's been reported that you haven't paid Child Maintenance please contact them so what do you do next. The paying parent must not avoid responding. If they do, it may simply be considered as beign non complient leading to Collect and Pay. Also the trouble is if you ignore it automated systems may mean that something may happen anyway, so what experience tells me with CMS that essentially you have to make a response and that response needs to be done normally within 14 days so what what you should actually do if you are a paying parent is respond within 14 days and obviously the quickest way to do that is via the portal. I do appreciate though that some people refuse to use the portal but what I would say is if you use the portal it goes directly to your CMS account and therefore it goes directly to the person dealing with it. If you send evidence by post it could get lost in the post, but also all post that goes to CMS does not go directly to CMS, it goes to a mail handling centre, which is run by a private company. I'm not quite sure of the process but I believe at that point they scan your mail into the CMS computer system and obviously it gets allocated to a case and of course if you don't send information that identifies who you are, t's possible that they will get it but they won't be able to match the information to to you. Maybe because you've not put your reference number on there or maybe because your name's John Brown and there's 15 John Brown's, but you've not given your address so that's why I always say use the portal and for those who use the portal you go to the portal and you're essentially complete an online form. So you know all that I'm aware that there are some people out there that have this happens to them quite often, so I presume if they're not already doing this they do this, you just go online you fill out the form and it will say on there you haven't paid from such and such a date it will then list your payments. You then type in how much you've paid and you press submit then you need to back that up with supporting information. This is the time where you take a photograph of your bank statement and you upload it to the portal obviously the portal takes certain file types jpegs PNG files which are the normal files that you use for sending pictures, so you can send the pictures you can do this from your mobile phone you don't need to sit next to a computer and then of course at some point someone from CMS will look at this and make a decision. I personally would challenge and keep on challenging until I get an answer so if I'm accused of not paying, then clearly I would submit the information as quickly as possible to prove it, I would then probably follow that up with an email now obviously the CMS normally don't have emails but you can always email the child maintenance Service via the Department for Work and paensions. The email address fo child maintenance is correspondence@DWP.GOV.UK There are other email addresses that float around but that's the one I suggest you do because at least then it's going to the Department of Work and Pensions and they deal with it from there. For those who don't know the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) is a part of the Department of Work and Pensions, but personally I'd rather an email go to someone in the DWP bit so that they deal with it then the CMS Direct and that's it. Within 14 days it should be done. Now my recommendation is this if this keeps on happening to you, this is a form of financial abuse so if you find you are regularly being asked to pay prove that you've made a payment and you've made those payments report it, report to CMS when you upload your evidence upload a letter and ask them to record on your account that you are being financially abused and that your ex does this from time to time. Chapters: The video above has been split into chapters as follows. 00:00 Introduction 00:48 What Happens Next? 03:14 Evidence Your CMS Payment 05:53 Summary