FL-395 – Request For Productions Of Income And Expense Declaration – California Divorce

Hi, Tim Blankenship here with divorce661.com. In this episode we’re talking about the Request for Production of Income and Expense Declaration. I want to give you the rationale for its use and give you an example of where it was recently used.

The Request of Production of an Income and Expense Declaration allows you on an annual basis, without going to court, to basically ask for the other party, your spouse or your ex-spouse, to provide you with current income. The rationale behind that is to see if there is a need for an increase or modification in spouse support.

You can do this on an annual basis and it makes it nice and easy. As an example, we had a client call last week. We handled their divorce a couple years ago and they wanted to do a modification. We are always telling them just go ahead and call your spouse and see if they’ll just turn over the income and share that information because we can easily draft a stipulation to modify the spousal and child support based on the new income.

In this case, the other spouse would not produce it by the request, so the next step would be to serve the Request for Production of an Income and Expense Declaration.

A couple of things to note when you do this. They will have 30 days to respond and submit their Income and Expense Declaration, including their pay stub. Then, in serving, this is not a form that gets filed. Rather, you’re just going to serve it, but you need to serve it by certified mail return receipt so you have evidence that you’ve actually served it.

We’ve had cases in the past where people have made the request to the other party and they did not respond within the 30 days. If that happens, then you would just have to file a motion with the court. The unfortunate part is you’re kind of rolling the dice if you don’t know if there has been a change in circumstances. You can suggest there was.

In this case both the spouse receiving support changed jobs and she knew that her ex, the father, also had a new job and her suspicion was he was making more money. That’s what we’re doing with them. We’re having the Request for Income and Expense Declarations be produced and once we get those incomes, then we can make the modification for support, hopefully by agreement and stipulation.

Otherwise, we’ll just set a hearing for them and the court can decide.

Tim Blankenship, divorce661.com. Hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you soon.