Contact an Experienced Attorney when Assistance Needed
Video Transcribed: Child support tip for you. How do you get your ex’s payroll tax information every year to determine if you should do a modification? I’m Tulsa attorney James Wirth, and we’re about to talk about how to do that in Oklahoma.
All right. So once a child support order is in place, it can be modified if there’s a change of circumstances. So normally that would be a party’s income goes up, party’s income goes down and there’re other factors as well.
But how are you supposed to know whether your ex that you don’t even talk to on a daily basis, or on a regular basis, has had an income increase or got a job promotion? Well, Oklahoma law deals with that scenario.
So it’s in Title 43, section 118.3, and what that provides is on an annual basis on April 15th or after, you can request the other parties tax information and payroll information in order to determine if there’s been a change of income there.
So how you do that, is you send the request citing this statute by certified mail. Once that’s received, signed, by the other side, you want to get proof of that delivery.
10 days from that point, they should provide you their tax information, payroll information, to prove what their current income was for the prior tax year. And then you can look at that to determine if there’re changes that make it worthwhile for you to file a modification.
Okay. So how do you enforce that? What if they don’t provide the information? Well, there’s a mechanism in the statute. If they fail to provide that timely, you can file your motion to modify.
And then you could request that the other side pay your attorney’s fees because you filed it on the basis of them not providing you the tax information to know what their income is.
So that’s something that people can do on a regular basis every year to keep up to date on their ex, to see if their income has changed, to see if it’s worthwhile to file for a modification.
If their income has gone up a lot, it may maybe worthwhile to do so.
If your income has gone down, you’re going to know it, but you’re not going to know if theirs goes up unless you do this on a regular basis.
So, if you need help doing that, or have a child support question, or want to file for a modification, talk to an attorney, you can talk to somebody at my office by going to makelaweasy.com.
