Uklonenie ot alimentov (Russia)

Uklonenie ot alimentov 🇷🇺
Location: Russia
Definition: Evasion or reduction of child support payments by a parent, normally the father
Keywords: Russia – FSU – Family – Kinship – Care – Gender – Masculinity – Childhood – Evasion – Envelope
Clusters: Gaming the system
Author: Ekaterina Ivanova
Affiliation: School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, Australia

By Ekaterina Ivanova, School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Uklonenie ot alimentov (lit. evading alimony) includes a range of practices aimed at reducing the amount of formal child support payments while remaining within the bounds of the law and divorce settlement. The most common method of alimony evasion in Russia is through lowering one's official salary, which constitutes the base for automatic deductions of alimony. The difference between the official salary and earned income is pocketed, free from deductions by the state, corporate tax and social dues.

According to the Russian Family Code, alimony is paid as part of a divorce settlement by the non-resident parent to the one who was awarded residence and takes care of the children. The child support legislation maintains two options of alimony arrangements: either a resident parent brings the process of alimony collection to the state, or parents make a private informal agreement about the amount and the preferable method of payment. In a formal settlement, the court imposes a receiving order and forwards it to the bailiff service, which ensures that deductions are enacted. Based on the court order, the accounting department of the employer withholds part of the payer’s salary and transfers it to the resident parent.

In an informal settlement, parents exercise discretion in making their own arrangements about alimonies. However, their informal transfers are invisible to the state, and the resident parent is unable to bring the case to court, should non-payments occur. The majority of divorcing parents – around 60 percent – chose informal arrangements (or did not have any agreements at all) and only 38 per cent stated their payments were being imposed by court. The Family Code has a provision for parents to notarise their private agreement, thus making it official and enforceable, but in practice less than 1 per cent of couples use this option (Rzhanitsyna 2012: 17).

The advantage of the court-imposed alimony is state control. Thus, in cases of non-compliance the bailiff service is responsible for tracing the liable party and collecting arrears. As a result, common strategies of evading the court-imposed alimony come down to minimizing the base of official salary from which it is deducted. Liable parents opt for grey, or shadow, payments (seraya zarplata, tenevaya zarplata), whereby part of their income, usually not exceeding the official wage minimum is paid officially, and the most substantial part is paid in cash, off the books. Employers tend to be complicit in such schemes as they benefit from the reduction of corporate and social taxes also payable from the official salary base.

The unofficial part of salary is paid in envelopes, or simple envelope-like folded paper and referred to as salary in an envelope (zarplata v konverte). Such practices are not exclusive to Russia, but their scale differs from country to country. In Russia, grey salaries are common and widespread (at least 25 percent of salaries is not reported, according to a business daily RBK), and seem not to be perceived as morally reprehensible. Informal wages are present across sector, economic class and type of employer. They are seen as an illicit strategy of tax evasion, which benefits the parties, both companies and workers, at least in the short term (see also alga aploksnē, rad na crno, cash in hand). In the case of child support minimisation, however, the scheme can benefit non-resident parents. If liable parents want to pay less, they can ask their employers to pay salaries in an envelope. The legitimizing narratives for minimizing child support are similar to those of tax evasion, inclusive of freedom in choosing a way to support a child, creating some leverage to see the child, or restrict freedoms of the ex-spouse, thus preserving some power of discretion for those who want it.

There are further strategies to hide income and wealth that empower fathers in divorce settlement. Registering property on a third party, placing business revenues offshore, and other ways of hiding benefits can deepen the gender inequality associated with child bearing and care. Liable parents can also manipulate the Russian child support legislation. If a divorced father has another child, the mother of the new child can also claim child support from him (even if they are unmarried and even if he lives with them) so that it would reduce the child support payments deducted on behalf of his previous family (since child support is divided equally on all men’s children). Nevertheless, these strategies remain under the radar of the public outcry, while alimony evasion via grey salary is the most common practice reflected in the public discourse on evading fathers as well as in research.

Despite the gender-neutral language of the Russian family and child support legislation, evasion of alimony is a gendered social problem. The vast majority – over 93 percent – of children stay with their mothers after separation and fathers become non-resident parents liable to pay alimony (Rzhanitsyna 2012: 14). Subsequently, a typical alimony non-payer (neplatel’shchik) is male, and many Russians are familiar with ‘deadbeat fathers’ through public discourse and personal experience. It is widely acknowledged that men often take advantage of informal employment practices to minimize the payments imposed by court (Rzhanitsyna 2015: 65). This is an ‘open secret’ that many fathers are not embarrassed of. Moreover, evaders sometimes brag. In research, fathers expressed little hesitation to confess that they personally used such strategy to reduce their alimony payments (Ivanova 2018). There are exceptions, of course, but they do not affect the public image of the gender gap, deepened by divorce parenting and alimony issues.

Child support evasion is an acknowledged problem, albeit the scope of it is difficult to estimate directly, precisely because many evaders manage to keep the façade of formal compliance with the law. Research and indirect assessments provide some insights. For example, less than 50 percent of resident parents in Russia claimed they ever received alimony (Rzhanitsyna 2012: 17). Half of those who received alimony said that it was 50 percent or less of the monthly child subsistence minimum (Ovcharova 2010: 24). That is, the received sums tend to balance on the edge of the minimal support.

Alimony evasion cannot simply be accounted for by fathers’ reluctance to provide for their children after divorce. Qualitative research has shown that it is court-imposed payments many fathers oppose (Ivanova 2018). Alimony after divorce is a sore subject for men as it touches on crucial features of masculinity. One of the keystones of masculine identity in many cultures has been the breadwinner status, which provides men with financial power and control over financial decision-making within the household. In Russia, despite a historically high level of female employment, an ideal man is considered to be the primary, if not a sole breadwinner (Kiblitskaya 2000, Ashwin Lytkina 2004, Lipasova 2017, Yusupova 2017). Marital separation alters monetary relations in families, from voluntary bestowal to compulsory entitlements. (Zelizer 1996, for the adaptation of her classification of monetary transfers to child support, see Bradshaw et al 1999, Natalier & Hewitt 2010, Ivanova 2018). Such transformation is sensitive to fathers, as they continue to define alimony as ‘their’ money and claim accountability on its expenditure (Ivanova 2018). Consequently, many Russian fathers perceive the court-imposed alimony as unfair as it unconditionally entitles their ex-partners to a part of the man´s income, and creates legal constraints for their movement (non-payers, for example can be held at crossing the border of the Russian Federation). Thus, many opt for paying informally.

Such gendered attitudes are not unique to Russia; similar narratives can be found elsewhere (Natalier Hewitt 2010, 2014), but in Russia, court-imposed alimony carries an additional stigma. Many mothers share negative attitudes towards an official alimony and prefer to agree on informal transfers for the sake of peace keeping and a ‘good divorce’, even at a risk of not being able to enforce their informal agreements. However, in cases of confrontation, where mothers wish to formalise alimony, fathers resort to the grey salary strategy or threaten to do so. The awareness of the widespread practices of alimony evasion undermines the effectiveness of this legal provision. Mothers refuse to apply for official child support because they believe that their time, energy and effort will result in less than they would have gotten informally. Thus, Russian fathers generally have more bargaining power and discretion in decision-making about alimony payments.

References

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