Recording private maintenance income on Centrelink systems 277-51030010

Child support, spousal maintenance, discharged child support arrears and voluntary maintenance received by an FTB customer or their partner may affect the customer's rate of FTB Part A. In certain cases, child support, spousal maintenance, discharged child support arrears and/or voluntary maintenance may need to be manually recorded on a customer's record.

From 1 July 2012, customers who privately collect their child support are deemed to be receiving their full child support assessed amount and will have their FTB Part A assessed on that amount regardless of the actual amount collected, unless they:

• have a partial exemption in place and they are collecting a lesser amount
• discharge arrears owed from a Child Support collect period
• privately collect child support arrears relating to a private collect period before 1 July 2012

Customers can receive spousal maintenance privately or they can ask Child Support to collect it for them. If the customer is collecting the spousal maintenance:

• privately, the full amount collected (child support assessment plus the spousal maintenance amount) must be recorded on the customer's record to make sure the correct rate of FTB is paid
• via Child Support, no updates are needed as Child Support will advise the full amount (child support assessment plus the spousal maintenance amount)

If spousal maintenance is being received from someone who is not paying child support, there is nowhere to code it on the customer's record. It must be recorded in a DOC. There is no ability to record spousal maintenance in the Centrelink system.

Where spousal maintenance has been received as a lump sum, see Assessing capitalised maintenance income for Family Tax Benefit (FTB).

Arrears can only be discharged if the customer elects to change their collection method from Child Support collect to private collect. From 1 July 2012, customers who change their collection method to private collect have the option of either:

• Asking Child Support to collect the outstanding arrears. Disbursement amount details will be automatically transferred from the Child Support system to the Centrelink system via the data exchange when the customer receives them, or
• Discharging Child Support from the responsibility of collecting the arrears, effectively advising Child Support that these amounts will be collected privately. Details of the discharged arrears are not included in the entitlement data transferred from Child Support and therefore must be recorded on the customer's record to make sure the correct rate of FTB is paid for the remainder of the financial year in which the arrears were discharged.
  The discharged arrears amount will need to be manually coded by the Child Support Unit (CSU) and will be included in the Maintenance Income Test (MIT) in addition to the customer's ongoing child support entitlement in the year it is discharged, regardless of the period to which it relates.
  An exception to this is if the customer has been granted a VIO MAT exemption, any arrears discharged will not be taken into account for the MIT

Note: discharged child support arrears in relation to a child who is no longer an FTB child should not be included in the MIT. This is because it is not for the maintenance of an FTB child. If there are other remaining FTB children, only the portion of the discharged arrears that relates to the current FTB children should be included in the MIT.

This can be recorded as:

• voluntary maintenance where it is received by a person who does not have a child support case for the relevant children
• actual maintenance where the:
• amount received is a combination of child support and spousal maintenance (and the spousal maintenance is not being collected by Child Support)
• where the customer receives less than their child support assessment amount and has been granted a partial exemption, or
• customer received less than their child support assessed amount for a private collect period and a full maintenance exemption has been backdated

Notes: effective from 21 September 2015, customers can no longer ask Child Support to backdate the case end to align with the exemption start date. This means that where the customer is granted a full exemption from a date in the past, additional coding is needed by Centrelink to remove the uncollected child support from the Maintenance Income Test.
If a private collect customer receives more than the amount assessed by Child Support and the additional amount is not related to arrears accrued for a private collect period before 1 July 2012, the amount is not to be recorded.