Family Responsibility Office- Powers

The last couple of days I have been reading various articles in several Toronto newspapers and have been listening to talk radio in the Toronto area that had to do with the ability of the Family Responsibility Office to now be able to seize/impound a payers vehicle once he has fallen behind in payments etc.

My feeling towards this is twofold. Being a payer and having proudly paid support for my children and not having any issues with FRO personally, I can say that FRO is there to do a job and that is to simply enforce court orders or agreements that parties have agreed on and want FRO to enforce. Having said that, many times, in order to make changes to an order, one has to file a motion. Motions are typically easy to do and one does not have to spend lots of money on lawyers, instead they can do it themselves. The motions I would group in the easy column would be a change in support motion that was caused due to being laid off and or sickness and was not engineered by the payer would be a straight forward motion that would be dealt with relatively quickly. Every other motion I would group in the more difficult column and depending on your experience and expertise, would consider hiring a lawyer.

In over five years paying support, I was never late with a payment. When my income changed and I could no longer maintain paying the amount I was paying I had to file a motion to reduce my payments because I was now making less. During the time it took the court to change the amount I had to pay, I only paid the book amount and as such was falling into arrears for those months it took the court to lower my amount. In the end that arrears was erased because the court based my support on the book amount and therefore though technically I did go into arrears, the court retroactively erased these arrears. Confusing, I know. Anyway, during this time I received a letter from FRO telling me I was in arrears and they give you options on how you can arrange to pay back this money. I advised that I was currently before the courts and they told me they wouldn't enforce anything until my motion was dealt with. I simply had to give them my case number and court date. So in my case, FRO was easy to deal with.

The seizing or impounding of a vehicle, I would think would be used by FRO in extreme cases in which an individual has had an order to pay and has avoided paying at every cost, has tried to outrun FRO and his responsibility to his children and the arrears are staggering. Keeping in mind that taking someones vehicle would considerably hinder that persons ability for employment. If FRO can, on an individual bases, accurately and fairly look at every case and the persons circumstances and interpret properly the orders they are to enforce then it should be no problem. Keep in mind there will always be those individuals who fall through the crack and get screwed. That's my blurb for the day.