FRO HURTS BOTH SIDES IN DIVORCE, LAWYER SAYS
The Ottawa Sun, BY DONNA CASEY, August 10, 2006 Page: 4
A scathing report from Ontario's watchdog slamming the office in charge of enforcing child-support orders has made public what divorcing couples have known for years, says one Ottawa lawyer.
The Family Responsibility Office is underfunded, its staff overworked and generally "rife with problems," says Russ Molot, who specializes in family law.
"It's kind of like your well-intentioned in-law you wish you'd never met," Molot says about the Family Responsibility Office.
Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin criticized the provincial agency, which was created more than a decade ago as a streamlined central registry, for taking a "lackadaisical attitude" to helping parents receive the money owed them to support their children.
"They simply will not manoeuvre outside what their policy books say," says Molot, adding many of his clients wind up back in court unnecessarily.
"There's generally a huge disservice to both payors and payees," says Molot of the office's handling of many cases. Molot says he'd like to see the office decentralized, bringing the enforcement of child-support orders back to local courts.
Renate Diorio, co-founder of Families Against Deadbeats, says the provincial government needs to tackle the crushing workload of the FRO's staff.
With each caseworker handling an average of 2,000 cases, there's little effort made to "trace, locate and collect" the $1.35 billion of child support payments in arrears.
"It's really just a high-class collection agency for those in compliance," says Diorio.
"Children are the losers in all this. Children's lives are at stake here."
2006 Sun Media Corporation. All rights reserved.
