Recovering Arrears of Maintenance Payment

The official term for alimony recovery is 'Recovering arrears of maintenance payments.' As recent as 26 May 2021, Councillor Elizabeth Quat has posted the question of 'Recovering arrears of maintenance payments' at LegCo. The answer from Secretary for Home Affairs Caspar Tsui at LegCo is as follows. 'We understand that specialized agencies or schemes are in place in some overseas countries to handle matters relating to maintenance payments. The HK government has commissioned a research team through the Family Council to study the system of collection of maintenance payments, enforcement of maintenance orders, examine the pros and cons of overseas systems and analyze their application in HK.' Up to now, there is now further news from Home Affairs Department.

Advocacy Committee has managed to locate more statistics on the size of this underprivileged group who are women suffering because they are not receiving full alimony from their ex-husbands. There are some 58400 single parents rearing their children aged below 18 in Hong Kong, taking up 8% of all families in Hong Kong. According to a survey of Census and Statistics Department, of all divorcees entitled to maintenance, 41% could not receive full payments from their ex-spouses in 2015, but most (88%) of them did not apply to court for arrears recovery, partly on the grounds of complicated court procedures. Actually as many as one-third of single-parent families are living below the poverty line. This information has also been conveyed to the SSC, so that they may consider service projects helping this underprivileged group.