Women’s group proposes new authority to make ex-spouses pay up
A Singapore Council of Women's Organisations taskforce is proposing that a new body be set up to enforce the payment of monthly maintenance sums from an ex-spouse to his or her family.
Statistics show, even with a court-issued maintenance order, 1,700 people, mainly women, had to apply for the orders to be enforced last year.
Nearly half of the 1,700 had to apply at least twice - a process that could take months if ex-spouses keep on defaulting on payments.
The new body - called the Maintenance Services Authority, would help to ease the recovery process in several ways.
One is through powers the courts currently lack.
For instance, the courts now leave it up to the claimnant to locate the ex-spouse to receive payments, failing which, there's little other substantial remedy.
It is proposed that the new authority be given access to the databases of the HDB, CPF Board and income tax departments in order to trace the whearabouts of the paying party.
The authority should also be able to search for all assets related to the paying party.
It could also reduce the acrimony between both parties and the time taken for payments to be made, benefitting the claimnants.
Ms Malathi Das, member of the taskforce and Vice President of the Law Society of Singapore:
"Whenever you deal with a court system is that because it's an adversarial system you'll have the claimnant's side of the story and you'll also have the other party wanting to contest and the judge has then to come back and make decision. So it can end up being a very long-drawn process still. Whereas if you have the authority being the person in the middle, collecting and getting that information, not necessarily revealing the information to the other side, then you've a very comfortable intermediary that still achieves the purposes of getting that information, but balances that against the interests of the paying party with his needs for confidentiality and privacy."
The proposals draw from focus groups discussions with counsellors, wives and ex-husbands among others, as well as the experiences of other jurisdictions like in Australia and Britain.
--938Live