Can I prevent my spouse from manipulating their income to avoid paying child support? How do I prove that my spouse’s change in income was voluntary? Lee Rosen, retired divorce attorney and founder of the Rosen Law Firm, shares his experiences.
Can my spouse avoid paying child support by quitting his or her job? Transcript
I’m Lee Rosen. Can my spouse avoid paying child support by quitting his or her job?
That’s a difficult situation and I will tell you it happens more often than you imagine. People start reading and thinking and figure, hey, I’ll just quit and then I won’t have to pay all the support that my spouse is demanding. And they start playing games and thinking they can use the system to their advantage. What’s really unfortunate about it is that it hurts the kids. I mean, that’s who really loses out when this sort of thing happens. But absolutely, it’s a situation where manipulation takes place and people definitely try to change their incomes and do things financially in order to pay less, and so we’ve got to be prepared for that.
So does it work? Can a spouse manipulate their income in order to avoid child support? Well, it’s interesting. The judge in those cases has to look at all the facts and circumstances and has to determine if your spouse has intentionally and voluntarily reduced their income in an effort to avoid paying child support.
And if the judge finds that that’s the case, that there was an intentional and voluntary reduction in income to avoid paying child support, then the judge can do what is called impute income. The judge can impute income to that spouse so they can treat the spouse just like they’re earning more money than they may in fact be earning. So if that’s what happens, then manipulating the system isn’t going to work for that spouse. It’s just they’re going to end up paying the support they should have been paying all along.
But sometimes a reduction in income actually does result in a reduction in child support. There was an interesting case recently in North Carolina where a woman had a job that involved a lot of, let’s call it sort of overtime pay. She was working extra hours, but she was also getting paid for making available late at night and on the weekends. So she was getting a lot more than she might have gotten if she had worked a strict forty hour work week.
And when she got divorced, she changed her work schedule. She was a household with two parents and now she was going to be a single parent. She needed to move from these extra hours to a more traditional nine to five schedule, and so she did that. Well, when she switched her schedule and she was no longer getting this extra money for working late at night, her income went down.
And the spouse in that case argued, hey, this is a voluntary and intentional reduction of income, and the court ought to impute the higher level of income. Well, the Court of Appeals said, no, that’s not what we’re going to do. This is reasonable. This is expected.
This is a natural circumstance that happens when people change their lives. And so in this instance, she was permitted to pay the lower support and income was not imputed. So the bottom line on this issue is that child support is complicated. It can be tricky.
And people may very well try to manipulate the situation. You’ve got to be prepared for that and anticipate it, but the law covers it. Be prepared to make your arguments to support it with the facts and you’ll get the appropriate amount of child support in your case.
For more information on what to do if your spouse is trying to void paying child support, contact us or call us at (919) 787-6668.
Lee is the founder of Rosen Law Firm and, while retired, still lives on through this website, a huge repository of information to help educate people about family law. It demystifies the divorce process, sharing the secrets and information that other lawyers normally try to keep hidden. Today, this website contains a vast assortment of webinars, legal forms, statutes, Q&As with lawyers, audio and video courses, articles, and lots more.
