Child Support | Separation Maintenance | Post-Marital Maintenance: Concealment of Information – Case Example

For 21 years, Mr Roth (all names changed) paid maintenance for his daughter Caroline Frege from Würzburg, whom he never saw in person, as the mother had refused any contact from birth. When Caroline reached adulthood, Mr Roth, living in Bern, Switzerland, made several postal attempts to contact her, but received no direct response. Instead, her mother informed him that Caroline wanted nothing to do with him. Out of disappointment, Mr Roth began to have doubts: had Caroline ever received his letters? Was she still attending school? Did the child support payments actually reach her? The mother consistently claimed that Caroline, now 22, was still in school, lived in the mother’s apartment, had no fixed income, and no personal bank account, which is why all payments were made to the mother’s account. The claim regarding the bank account seemed suspicious to Mr Roth, as almost every adult in Germany has their own account.

Due to these uncertainties, Mr Roth sought the advice and services of our experienced detectives. Observations were conducted to verify whether the mother’s maintenance claims were accurate or if child support fraud was occurring.

Waiting for Caro – no sign of the subject

The first three days of observation by our detectives were overshadowed by a significant problem: neither the subject Caroline Frege nor her mother appeared at their registered and purported residential address. Instead, the investigators repeatedly saw an elderly woman (80 years or older) at the windows of the apartment in the multi-occupancy building. Although the surname of mother and daughter was on the doorbell plate and the mailbox, this could have been a deliberate deception designed to misuse the address as a postal delivery point. The investigators suspected that the subject did not actually live at this address — on the one hand good for Mr Roth, since his doubts about the mother’s honesty gained new substance, but on the other hand problematic, because a daughter without a known residential address could not be taken under observation.

To gather fresh clues at Caroline’s alleged place of training, our two-person detective team split up on the third day of the investigation: one observer stayed at the known address, the other went to the school. But the daughter did not appear there either and no clues to her whereabouts could be obtained. At least the subject’s mother did appear at the known address during the day, entered the building with her own key, spent a good half hour inside, returned with several letters in her hand and drove off again. Our private detectives followed her, but unfortunately she parked in an underground car park that belonged to an extensive complex of buildings with countless house numbers and many more tenants. Because she must have left the car park via an underground access, our investigators could not determine which part of the complex she had then entered. They finally checked all doorbell plates at the end of the operation, but the mother’s name was not found on any of them.

New address = new chance for our detectives

In agreement with Mr Roth, a fourth observation attempt was to be made at the known address — not at the newly discovered but difficult-to-monitor building complex. If Caroline again failed to appear, the results of a parallel address investigation would have to be awaited before further surveillance measures. In the early afternoon — shortly before the planned end of the observation — the subject actually ran down the street towards the purported residential address. She did not enter the building with her own key but rang at her alleged flat and was let in. Later Caroline left the house accompanied by the elderly woman who had been seen several times at the windows of the relevant apartment. Both women travelled by public transport to a kindergarten and took part in a St Martin procession there, without any direct connection between the two and one of the children being apparent. Afterwards the subject accompanied the elderly woman back home and, after a short stay in the flat, took a bus to another address in Würzburg where she also spent the night. Her name was not on the doorbell plate, but there was a “WG A.R., C.F., K.R.” — possibly an indication of a shared flat with Caroline Frege (C.F.) as a flatmate.

With alternating observers, our agency’s surveillance was continued well into the following day, since at last the opportunity had arisen to check whether the subject

• attended school,
• carried out gainful employment,
• actually lived at the new address,
• lived together with her mother.

The only problem: the following day was a Saturday.

Eventful-light but instructive

The subject was thus finally recorded. In order not to squander this chance through cost-saving measures (see our detective fees) and to ensure that Caroline really lived at the new address, the observation was continued on Saturday in agreement with Mr Roth. As expected, the subject did not attend school that day nor did she undertake gainful employment. Instead she spent a few hours shopping in the city centre, ate a kebab and retreated for the remainder of this unpleasant November day to the new dwelling. That is not a great deal of activity, but the day nevertheless provided our private detective agency with insight into two important points:

Firstly, the probability increased that Caroline would permanently reside there, since she returned to that address in the evening and, secondly, her displayed surname was found on the mailbox plate of the flat-share inside the building (the inconspicuous entry to inspect the mailbox had not been possible for our investigators on the previous day because of the late hour). Secondly, Caroline had withdrawn money with a bank card from a Sparkasse cash machine, proving that she had at least the power of disposal over an account and, in all likelihood, even her own account. The two newly established addresses of mother and daughter strongly suggested that the two did not, contrary to the statements to our client, live together. Thus they were separate households that certainly did not operate via the same bank account.

Breaches of the duty to disclose information

In the following weeks our private detectives carried out further spot daytime observations on different weekdays. It gradually became clear that the subject

• actually permanently lived at the new address,
• regularly visited the original observation object to see the elderly lady,
• did indeed attend school, although only two out of five working days,
• on the other three working days worked as a trainee in a service company.

The mother never once appeared at Caroline’s new address.

Under current German case law, income generated by the child from employment is to be offset against the maintenance entitlement — even if it stems from remuneration during vocational training. Thus Caroline’s employment led to a reduction, if not the complete elimination, of the maintenance entitlement (depending on the amount of the training remuneration). The commencement of employment and the amount of the remuneration should have been communicated to the maintenance payer, i.e. Mr Roth, as a matter of course. If the omission was intentional, it would have constituted a case of fraud. To clarify the question of intent and also to examine the issue of culpability (mother, daughter or both), our agency undertook two further measures.

A clarifying conversation between the detectives and the subject

After conclusion of the observation measures, an investigator obtained a school certificate for the subject using the client’s power of attorney. The certificate did confirm the pupil status — part-time/dual system — but gave no information as to whether Caroline actually attended classes to the required extent. More importantly: according to the certificate the subject had held this status for over two years. The last time the mother had confirmed the daughter’s pupil status and explicitly stated that Caroline generated no income was less than a year earlier. Intent was therefore present and an “accidental forgetting” to forward information to the maintenance-paying father was ruled out.

Because Mr Roth, as mentioned at the outset, suspected that his letters had never reached the daughter, he was strongly inclined from afar to blame the mother. For this reason he instructed our investigators to speak to his daughter about the overall problem. The results of the conversation, briefly summarised:

• Caroline had never heard of her father’s attempts to make contact.
• The relationship with her mother had been strained for years. They had not lived together since Caroline was 17.
• Caroline received no financial support from her mother, and thus not the father’s maintenance payments.
• As Caroline received sufficient training remuneration and had generated income from gainful employment since the age of 18, she would in any case no longer have had a maintenance entitlement.
• She of course had her own bank account.
• The lady regularly visited at the original address was her grandmother.
• She would very much like to meet her father and therefore gave the investigators his telephone number.

With that, this case was closed for our detectives. Subsequently we learned that personal meetings and a marked rapprochement between father and daughter had taken place. In addition, according to our latest information, Mr Roth was engaged in advanced, lawyer-mediated negotiations concerning the repayment of the maintenance payments unlawfully collected by the mother over many years and the detective costs incurred as a result.