Complaint Review: Utah Office of Recovery Services

I'd better start with a little background info: My husband has a 9 year old child with an ex-girlfriend.  We started paying her child support the day the child was born and paid every month without fail. She is supporting one child. We have 3 children together and he had 2 others when we met that he was paying child support for. There was never a court order for him to pay child support, we just did as it was the right thing to do.

3 years ago, his ex was living in California and got state medical assistance for their son. The state of California wanted my husband to pay for the medical. We decided to get health insurance for his son through my work instead, but it took a couple months to get in order. Meanwhile, the State of California asked the State of Utah to get my husband's income information. The State of Utah Office of Recovery Services saw that there was no child support order in place and decided they were going to take care of it, nobody asked them to get involved at all and they told my husband's ex that they were not going to act on the child support order unless she asked them to (which we knew was incorrect, they wouldn't use their resources if they weren't going to be able to collect the child support). By this time the State of California had received our insurance information and dropped their claim.

We received papers from the State of Utah ORS stating we could no longer pay my husband's ex directly anymore and came up with an amount that we could not afford. They based it on my husband's income, however they would not take into consideration that my husband had to travel to Las Vegas to work and pay all his own expenses. They also wouldn't take into consideration that I am disabled and have excessive medical bills. We also have an autistic son who has extensive medical bills. So we contested their amount and prepared to go to court.

We went to court and the judge awarded us credits for my husband's travel expenses and half of our medical expenses. But it took over a year to get to court and by that time there was several thousand dollars owed in child support, which we have caught up.

3 weeks ago my husband was laid off. He may have a job offer in a couple weeks, but it is for half the amount of pay he was making before. He called the Office of Recovery Services to see what he could do. They told him he could request a review and they might modify the child support but it will take several months and it's not retroactive to when his income changed, however if he had gotten a raise and his child support was being raised it would be retroactive. His unemployment is $1600 a month and they expect him to continue to pay $615! I can no longer work due to my disability and we have 3 children at home to support. How is this fair???