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