3 May 2019
 Categories: Law, Blog

When parents divorce, both parties are expected to fully divulge their financial information to the court for various reasons—including the determination of child support. Sometimes, however, one spouse will try to hide as much of his or her income as possible in order to avoid paying a fair amount of child support.

If your spouse is playing games with money that could affect your child support order, what can you do? Well, with the help of your attorney—plenty. Here are some of the ways that hidden income can be tracked down.

Your spouse's lifestyle can be examined.

Sometimes this takes the help of a private investigator, but the court will generally consider evidence that your spouse is living lavishly proof that he or she isn't suffering from the near-poverty he or she is claiming.

Photos of your spouse throwing parties, eating out at nice restaurants, shopping for luxury items, and engaging in pricey hobbies can all be used by the court to infer that his or her income is higher than alleged.

You spouse's social media can be reviewed.

Social media provides a wealth of opportunities these days for the court to determine what's really going on in a parent's life. Despite being fairly public, people often post information on them that they wouldn't want to be seen in court.

Photos of your spouse on his trip to the Alps for skiing or posts about that "fantastic vacation" she took to Mexico can be helpful to show the court that he or she is withholding income from the child support calculations. 

Your spouse's financial records can be subpoenaed.

Much of the time, spouses who try to hide their income from the court in order to pay less child support are self-employed or business owners. Their once-thriving businesses seem to suddenly develop problems just about the time of their divorces. Even though the businesses still look healthy, these spouses will claim problems in market prices, razor-thin margins due to competition, and other woes are eating up their profits.

Often, you can disprove those assertions using the power of a subpoena. The court can demand that your spouse turn over his or her tax returns, credit card statements, bank statements, canceled checks, rent statements, loan records, business records, and more. A review by a forensic accountant can often show how much your spouse is paying out in expenses each month. If the total is more than the income he or she is reporting, that's proof that your spouse is hiding income through financial tricks somehow.

If you're convinced that your spouse is lying about his or her income in order to evade child support obligations, talk to your child support attorney today about what you can do together to remedy the situation.