Problems persist as province invests in program to collect child, spousal support

The Nova Scotia government says it has made great strides in repairing a program that helps people get the court-ordered spousal and child support payments they're owed, but acknowledges the maintenance enforcement program still needs work.

"Over the last year the department has been transforming services within the maintenance program and that's intended to improve the flow of payments to spouses and children," said Justice Minister Mark Furey, whose department oversees the maintenance enforcement program.

Part of that transformation included hiring five new full-time staff last year, which Furey said has improved the program's efficiency and lightened the workload onexisting staff.

The program now has 52 full-time employees who serve about 15,000 families. Enforcement workers are also co-operating more closely with the courts to make sure the exact payments identified in a court order are paid.

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But problems persist.

"In my view it's probably not fast enough, but there is some improvement,"said legal aid lawyer PaulStordy.

Stordy serves as summary advice counsel at the Nova Scotia Supreme Court family division in Halifax and helps people representing themselves in family court.

He said many people he works with still have trouble contacting maintenance enforcement workers if they encounter problems.

That makes life extra difficult on families seeking help because they haven't received a payment, said Stordy.

"Any delays in enforcing them would cause hardship on the recipient or the payee because they're not getting the child support," said Stordy.

"It could mean that the money's used towards getting groceries.It could be used towards putting heat in the home that the child lives in. So it could lead to some difficult situations."

Stordy has also heard from other lawyers and clients representing themselves in court that they get contradictory information from enforcement workers.

A person may create a payment schedule with one worker, only to find that plan isn't honoured by another employee, he said.

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"That's still a concern," he said. "I don't know how that works with consistency between workers."

Confusion like that shouldn't happen, according to Furey.

"They have both morning and evening meetings, briefings every day to prioritize files to ensure that the communications are consistent with clients and quite frankly to ensure the efforts they're putting in are meeting the needs of clients."

The needs of many clients are being met, said Furey.

Payments to recipients are up about six per cent to almost $44 million a year, while the amount of unpaid support has been reduced to $57.8 million, down from the $63.4 million reported by the auditor general back in May of last year.

However, that drop in unpaid support isn't as dramatic as it seems, according to Stordy. He said some of the old files in the system make it seem like more money is owing when it actually isn't.

In some cases children who were owed child support have grown up and are no longer supposed to be receiving money. But on the books it still appears as if they're owed that money.

He said some of those files are now being removed by the court and maintenance enforcement, so the amount of unpaid support is dropping without any actual money being collected.

"Some of the numbers in terms of it going down, in terms of what's owing, may in fact not be a collection but may be a correction of what would be owing," said Stordy.

"The reality is the numbers of what was owing through payables, through maintenance enforcement, may have in fact been inflated because of these older files that just needed to be cleared up."

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Furey said even if children have grown up, they would still have identified arrears and would need to go back to court to have their arrears corrected or abolished.

The Justice Department hopes to iron out the problems with the maintenance enforcement program in the coming years. Furey is in talks with other provinces to make it easier to collect money from people who move away from Nova Scotia.

The province is also putting $1.2 million to improving the maintenance enforcement website, which is expected to roll out this spring.

Furey said it's important to make the program the best it can be.

"Maintenance enforcement payments in many cases is the difference between young families living in poverty or out of poverty," he said.