Family Responsibility Office

Many families in Ontario have come across the Family Responsibility Office. The agency was set up by the Ontario government to assist in the enforcement of child and spousal support orders and arrangements made after divorce. The job of the agency is to assist with creating an intuitive process where spouses can pay and collect support without undue stress on either side. 

However, the Family Responsibility Office has often come under criticism. While the stated objective of the agency is to help make couples’ post-marital arrangements work, the experience for many is not always positive. The agency has been dogged by controversy in recent times, and this adds unnecessary complexity to an already complicated divorce process. 

As a result, it is important to understand what the Family Responsibility Office is, what it does and the challenges it faces before couples decide to involve the agency in their marriage dissolution process. Here’s all you should know.

The Family Responsibility Office (FRO) is a government agency under the Ontario Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services. The agency was established under the watch of Marian Boyd when she served as Ontario Attorney General from 1993 to 1995. It derives its powers and functions from the Family Responsibility and Support Arrears Enforcement Act, 1996 and the Inter-Jurisdictional Support Orders Act, 2002.

Like the Ministry that oversees it, the FRO is primarily concerned with family law issues. Specifically, those that concern child or spousal support and other post-marital financial arrangements. The agency was created in response to the difficulty that ex-spouses sometimes have with enforcing or collecting child support. 

Sometimes, one parent may face considerable difficulty in getting the other parent to pay support accurately or on time. Before the establishment of the FRO, a parent in this situation would be left with few options to enforce the payment. Often, this would mean asking the court to make the other parent fulfil their obligations – an expensive and relatively lengthy process. 

The FRO steps into the role of enforcement instead. So, rather than approach the court just to ask that the other parent make their payment accurately or on time, an aggrieved parent or spouse can simply contact the FRO.

The FRO has several duties, but its primary duty is to enforce child support orders and the financial obligations of spouses to each other. The agency is capable of enforcing support payments that were ordered by a court or that are contained in a separation agreement. 

The agency collects child support payments from the payor parent, records the payment and then disburses the sum to the collecting parent. In instances where the payor fails to pay on time or accurately, the FRO is empowered to use a number of measures to enforce payment. These include: 

• Monthly support deductions directly from the payor’s employer or from the payor’s bank account, when authorized
• Wage garnishment
• Criminal prosecution for failure to pay or to settle arrears

As far as enforcement by the FRO is concerned, it does not matter if the payor parent is not resident in Ontario or Canada. Through the Inter-Jurisdictional Support Orders Act, the FRO enforces child support and spousal support obligations in the United States and more than 30 countries worldwide. 

In theory, all of this should make the FRO a beneficial and highly effective agency for people making or receiving support payments in Ontario. However, as the controversy that has trailed the agency over the years has shown, nothing could be further from the truth than this.