Writing the Questionnaire and Replies

Once you and your ex have completed your forms E and swapped them, you will need to write a questionnaire.

The questionnaire is a list of questions and requests about your ex’s financial disclosure. They will write a questionnaire to you too. You will need to respond to each other’s questionnaire.

The questionnaire is due to be filed at court and served on your ex no fewer than 14 days before the first hearing. The Replies will be due some time after the hearing.

Questionnaire

The purpose of the questionnaire

You and your ex both have a duty to give full and frank disclosure of your financial position. That duty is not just at the time you do your form E but also continues all the way through the case, if the situation changes.

While the forms E should contain everything clearly explained and have attached to them all the documents necessary, this isn’t always the case. There may be thinks that are unclear or have been left out, or there may be questions about things such as bank balances. The questionnaire is your opportunity to ask for this information.

It is perfectly ok if you don’t have any questions. It means that your ex has explained everything relevant to the case.

Format

Your questionnaire is just a list of questions. Number the questions.

It must be formatted in 12 point font and 1.5 line spacing. It can’t be more than 4 pages long. There has to be a header at the top.

We have a template that you can use.

Writing the questionnaire

Read your ex’s form E. Consider all the documents they have attached to it.

• Is there any information missing?

• Are there any assets that you thought your ex had, that are not on the form E?

• Are there any documents missing that they should have provided (check this against the checklist at the back of the form E)

• Are there any other documents that you want to see, for example to help decide whether to ask for a valuation or expert report.

You need to have enough information about what assets there are, because you will need those assets for housing and living expenses.

A questionnaire is not a fishing expedition. Your questions must be relevant to the issues in the case. This means that you need to think about the issues in the case before you draft your questionnaire. What is it that you need to know?

Some useful sorts of questions

Here are some common thing people ask about.

• What effort your ex has made to obtain a paid job or the scope to increase their working hours, and what amount they expect to be able to earn and when. This will help identify what they have to live on, and what they can borrow by way of mortgage to help buy a house.

• If there are issues around the other party’s health that affects their ability to earn you might need to know about that. That might include information about a prognosis or even the cost of carers.

• Whether they accept that any debts you have are matrimonial ie incurred for the benefit of the family. Similarly you need enough info about your ex’s debts to know whether they are matrimonial. This is relevant because generally the court ensures that the debtor has enough extra money to pay off those debts.

• What bonuses they get, and how regularly, or the amount of their earnings in prior years. This can help identify their true income.

• Questions about properties or other assets transferred recently. This could indicate hidden assets that should be dealt with as part of the case.

• Loans from or family members – is there a loan document? What are the terms of the loan? This is relevant because a loan might be repayable or the court might treat it as a ‘soft loan’ that doesn’t really need to be repaid. That’s obviously going to affect how much money there is to divide.

• You might want to ask for copies of audited business accounts and ask questions about directors’ loan accounts.

• You might want to check of any capital gains tax is payable on various assets such as second homes.

• You could ask them if they intend to cohabit or remarry.

• To ask about their income or capital needs if these sections of the form E have not been completed.

• If they are a beneficiary of a trust, you might ask for the trust deeds, the accounts, details of payments made over the years. This can establish whether the trust has a history of paying out to your ex, which might indicate it would do so in the future. If the trust is unexpected, you might want to ask when it was set up and when assets were transferred into it, and why.

Think about how to phrase the question. It’s not a good idea to ask a question that can be answered with the words ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as the other party can fully answer them without actually explaining themselves.

Some not useful questions

One of the things that often gets asked about is expenditure shown on bank statements. Sometimes it’s important to know why someone spent money on x thing. For example it might be that they have spent a large amount of money. It might be that they are giving money to someone to stop you claiming it. It might show a transfer to a bank account they haven’t mentioned before.

But much of the time questions about bank statement transactions are not relevant to the issues in the case. It’s not an opportunity to quiz your ex on when they bought flowers for their new partner, and anyway, asking about that is just going to make you feel lousy. Always ask yourself why you need to know.

Similarly, the questionnaires often ask about updated bank statements since the form E, but updated disclosure will be ordered by the court anyway so you don’t need to ask about it now unless there’s some urgency (for example because you think your ex is getting rid of assets).

Replies to Questionnaire

Replies won’t be due until some time after the first hearing – the court will set a deadline.

At the first hearing, you can ask the judge to remove any questions from the other party’s questionnaire that you don’t think you should answer (and they can do the same for your questionnaire).

The questions that the court might take out are:

• those that are not related to any of the issues in the case and therefore don’t need to be resolved to decide the case

• those where answering them would be disproportionately hard work or time consuming.

• If a questionnaire is not answered properly then the other party can serve a Schedule of Deficiencies. So if you have an issue with a question they want answered, raise it with the judge at the hearing.

If you keep to the court timetable you might both be able to reply to the questionnaires before the first hearing and therefore get ahead. This would be good because it can mean you can convert your first hearing to an FDR which is normally the second hearing.

Format

Use the same format as for the Questionnaire. We have a template you can use. It’s helpful to cut and paste your ex’s questions into your document and then type your answers below.