The Ohio Supreme Court will decide whether benefits such as a company car offered to a parent should count when it comes to calculating child support. When his income fell in 2009, Jeffrey Morrow of Medina had asked for a reduction in his payments to his ex-wife for their his two children, one of whom had special needs. But a court had ruled that the company car and paid insurance, the company provided cell phone and the company-paid OSU football tickets â together worth more than $16,000 â counted toward his income and refused his request. Morrowâs attorney John Ragnar told the justices that state law is clear on this.
Company benefits should be included as income, but only under circumstances stem from employment, self-employment or where the parent shared some ownership interest in the business providing the benefits. So thatâs not the case here with Mr. Morrow.
Ragnar said as Morrowâs income fell, his ex-wifeâs increased a bit. And Ragner said the car, phone and tickets were provided for business purposes, but Justice Paul Pfeifer wasnât sure. Pfiefer: âI donât understand your argument why thatâs not part of the familyâs package - $16,000 worth of stuff comes to him â â Ragner: âThatâs correct. Those are benefits.â? Pfiefer: âItâs stuff. Itâs a car. Itâs tickets. Itâs a cell phone. Everyone else pays for it. He doesnât pay for it. He gets it for free.â? Ragner: âWell, he gets it for free, as you would say, because he needs it to do his business.â? Tom Morris represents Morrowâs ex-wife Sherri Becker. He said thereâs a category called âother sources of incomeâ?, and that these kinds of benefits fall under that catch-all provision. âI think that if you get a benefit that provides a reduction in your living expense and itâs significant, of significant benefit that reduces your living expense, I think that should be counted towards your gross income, because weâre talking about for the kids. Itâs their child support that weâre trying to figure out," Morris says. And Morris said though the law includes a list of items that canât be used to calculate income, such as other child support or disability payments, it doesnât matter whether the parent is self-employed or owns the company, or if the parent works for someone else. âNowhere in that list did it come out and say, 'hey, collateral benefits or company benefits, we donât want you to do that for some policy reason,' which I would submit there is no policy reason why weâd want to treat children differently depending on the corporate structure of Mom and Dad.â? Bottom line, said Morris â a parent can have a lot of extra cash if his or her employer is providing a car, and that should be factored in.
If you are given one to use at your discretion, then it absolutely should count because those are dollars that you do not have to spend on your own vehicle.
But Morrow said lawmakers wrote the law this way on purpose â to stop one parent from taking advantage of the other, and a precedent in this case could hurt lower-income parents who need the benefits. âThey never intended, the General Assembly, to exclude company benefits. They just wanted to limit how it was used.â? The court will rule on this case in the next few months.