Don't let financial disclosure be your downfall.
In this case, the Court denied the Father's application due to deficiencies in his financial disclosure. This decision demonstrates how important it is to provide financial disclosure without delay.
In Reid v Chambers, 2022 ABKB 634, the Court provides a reminder that it is always in a party’s best interests to provide their financial disclosure in a timely fashion.
The Father Applicant applied to eliminate his child support arrears. In 2019, he had failed to provide up-to-date financial disclosure to the Mother and was imputed an income of $89,100 per annum by the Court. He paid some child support each month after 2019, but not the full amount of ordered child support, because “his life circumstances [had] prevented him from keeping up with his obligations” (at para 10). As a result, he accumulated approximately $18,000 in child support arrears. In November, 2021, he finally provided Notices of Assessment to the Mother for 2018 to 2020, which stated his income was between $29,000-$45,000. He claimed that his 2022 income would be approximately $52,000. He did not supply any disclosure regarding 2021 until July, 2022, which consisted only of pay stubs and some bank statements.
The Court denied the Father’s application to reduce arrears prior to 2019, stating that he could not rely on disclosure that was not delivered in a timely fashion to dispute an imputation of income two years after the fact (at para 16):
In this case, the Father’s income was imputed pursuant to the April 8, 2019 Order, presumably because the Father had not provided sufficient financial disclosure. As such, the Father cannot rely upon his disclosure produced in November 2021 to establish that the imputation in April, 2019 was higher than his actual income. He ought to have provided disclosure as it became available. His failure to do so prevents him from addressing any arrears incurred prior to the April, 2019 Order based upon a material change in circumstances.
The Court also denied the Father’s application to eliminate arrears incurred between April, 2019 and the date of application. Where no effective notice of a need for a change in child support is given, the Court will consider the application for variation to be the date of formal notice. However, timely and fulsome disclosure will be relevant. The Court found that because the Father had only responded to written interrogatories for financial disclosure on the eve of the application, and even that had been incomplete, the Father could not benefit from a reduction in support from the date of formal notice to the time of disclosure, as per the Supreme Court’s decision in Colucci v Colucci, 2021 SCC 24.
