One Parent Family Payment

armstrongracer

Can anyone out there tell me how the old (pre-2015) one parent family payment was calculated?

The situation is this: I'm a separated father of 7 year old twins, myself and their mother weren't married. Since separating 3 years ago I have been paying €800/month maintenance or €100/week per child. Financially things are really tight, after rent and maintenance I'm left with less than €1000/month to live on which is less than the amount Insolvency Ireland define a being necessary for minimum reasonable living expenses for a single working person and I have my children 10 nights out of 30 plus holidays. This is compounded by the fact I have zero savings. Despite being a fully engaged father and with no circumstances that would mitigate against me, the OP and her solicitors embarked on a vicious and ruinously expensive campaign at circuit court level in order to get sole custody and guardianship. I ran out of money and ended up defending myself against a top barrister in a room where I was the only man. Such was the level of arrogance and lying from the other side, I essentially won and the OP had to pay her own costs. The settlement plus the fees paid to my own solicitor earlier in the proceedings has left me flat broke. The contact and closeness I have with my children made it worth every penny.

I'm self employed and have ben perplexed for some time by the amount of tax I've been paying, I got my accountant to do some digging recently which just happened to coincide with a strange letter I got from the maintenance recovery unit. This was a shock because I have always paid maintenance and in 3 years they have never been in contact with me. Putting two and two together I'm assuming that they have been recovering the One-parent payment they were paying to my ex by hitting my tax credits. I phoned the recovery unit giving the reference on the letter. They said that they had tried to contact me in the past citing an address I haven't lived in for years which just happened to be the address I was living at when I first got my PPS number. That set alarm bells ringing. My ex lives 2 streets away and the house I'm living in now is the same one we used to live in as partners. She must have declared me as being as being an absentee father. I mentioned that I have always been paying maintenance, they confirmed that they were aware of that but mentioned a weekly figure much lower than I have been paying and was in the legal agreement. When I expressed incredulity as to the amount of maintenance they were quoting the person from the recovery unit got really suspicious. I finished the conversation very quickly at that point. So, it looks like my ex has under stated the amount of maintenance being paid by me and has been getting either a full one-parent family payment or a top up. I also pulled a copy of the application form from the DSP website and it specifically asks for my name, address, DOB & PPS number. It's fairly clear that she made a false declaration, she had all that and they would have contacted me at the correct address.

So it looks like I may be paying for my ex's fraud, what do I do? If I go back to the DSP with the facts she could be prosecuted, which I don't really want. However, financially I need to recover the money. The best thing would be to negotiate reduced maintenance payments to cover my losses on the proviso that I don't report her. To do that I need to calculate what she would have been claiming as a top up, since I know the figure she stated (€120/week) and I know how much I paid (€200/week). She will deny this flatly, she has a history of lying under oath and even to her own solicitor. I won in court because I produced a sheath of emails from my ex which totally contradicted her sworn affidavit. I need to find out how the payment is calculated, the DSP website doesn't really give me that.

Thanks in advance.

FluffyAngel

first off ....dont fight fraud with fraud..
report and document the fraud ,it will save people like you and the rest of the law abiding country from propping up lifestyles

they will pay back any fees,funds,that were stolen from you ..

you are not responseabill for her actions..
shes a grown woman that understands the law and the ramifactions