Family Responsibility Office (FRO) is the Ontario Government agency that has a mandate of enforcing child and spousal support orders and separation agreements. FRO can suspend the payor’s Driver’s Licence, report him to the credit bureau, suspend a passport, garnish wages and federal payments. Furthermore, it can send the payor to jail for up to 6 months for non-payment of support.
Unfortunately, FRO consistently makes its way to the Ombudsman officer annual report due to the number of complaints associated with their work. Some of them may be justified but some may not. In either case, it would be prudent to have a lawyer by your side. Transitioning from this, a lawyer who knows how FRO operates is essential. This is true regardless of whether you are a recipient or a payor.
For example, if you are a recipient, you want to know whether you can enforce payments yourself or not. You also want to know what consequences you will face if you do. FRO has a discretion to refuse enforcement of your support if you decided to enforce it yourself. Alternatively, you may want to know what steps to take in order to ensure FRO takes all appropriate steps. In addition, it is important to know how FRO can move forward with the enforcement of your support. At the very least, you may want to know what enforcement mechanisms FRO has in their “toolbox”.
Evgeniy Osipov, the principal family law lawyer at Progressive Legal Solutions, worked at FRO and knows the kitchen inside out. In fact, in order to stay current with respect to FRO and applicable caselaw and legislation on a practical level, Evgeniy continues to act for FRO as a panel lawyer enforcing support payments.