Just and equitable rule ?

Hello can anyone advise me here ?

Essentially, I thought that all CMS decisions had to pass a ‘just and equitable’ test, am I right ?

It’s a long story, but I had my appeal hearing last week about some variations that have been applied to my CM liability. These variations are discussed in other threads on this forum but basically :-

One variation is a notional income calculation on some money that was invested exclusively to repay an interest-only mortgage on a property that I let out. I am also assessed on the income from that property. My argument is that if I had chosen instead a repayment mortgage instead of an interest-only mortgage then the money that is being assessed would not even exist as I would have directed funds to pay the mortgage debt rather than to the ISA where they exist today, so why should how I chose to repay my mortgage have such an impact on my CM liability.

This property has only been making a taxable profit for the last couple of years, and since it has I decided to offset this additional taxable income with additional pension contributions - mainly for tax planning purposes, but also taking care not to overdo it and to ensure that my overall taxable income from both salary and property is broadly the same as it was when I was not making any profit from the property and also not making any additional pension contributions I.e. my CM liability remained the same. These pension contributions are also deemed acceptable according to para 36020 of the variations section of the CMS Decision Makers Guide (refer sticky for that). The tribunal judge was saying that this document however is not binding, and that I am effectively damaging the welfare of my children by preventing that property profit from increasing my overall taxable income and thus my CM payments.

So in essence I am claiming that in essence these variations are ‘unfair’. I.e. why should a simple decision on how I chose to repay my mortgage impact my CM liability, and also how can it be argued that by effectively routing my new income stream from property to my pension instead of being left as is to be taxed (at a higher rate) and thus assessed for CM be considered as ‘unreasonable diversion of income’ when this action has zero impact on my taxable income and the CM payments are not reduced.

So I am left feeling very frustrated by what I see as essentially unfair variation decisions.

p.s. I also made an offer to my ex- to pay 50% of all child maintenance costs rather than go the CMS route (we both earned similar salaries). She rejected this what I strongly believe was an eminently fair offer, and also by doing so introduced a degree of separation between myself and our children - my main motivation for this offer was to remain as close a relationship as possible with my children.