I was divorced a year ago and have a court-approved marital settlement. My ex-husband is not following the agreement. For example, he is to keep bills that are in my name that he is responsible to pay for in good standing.
He is always late making payments. He purchased items for me because he wanted to, and now he wants to charge me for the items by refusing to pay a credit card the court ordered him responsible to pay.
Upon the divorce my ex agreed in the marital settlement to purchase medical insurance for me, he didn't, and now I have some unpaid medical bills. He also agreed to return some personal belongings which he has not returned. What can I do about this?
Generally speaking, once your mediated divorce settlement was approved by the court it became a court order, and it can be enforced just like any other court order. That's the good news. The bad news is that to enforce it, you must go to court and ask the judge to issue an order directing enforcement. It happens all the time that people don't comply with court orders. In those cases, judges have various remedies such as throwing the person in jail until they pay or by directing a sheriff's sale of their property to get payment. You will need to seen an attorney to discuss how to proceed. I suspect your lawyer will recommend first a letter from the attorney demanding payment and then followed by court action if he fails to comply.
I'm sorry that the mediated agreement has not been followed, but I hope you will see this as a failure of the particular agreement (and the party) rather than a strike against mediation in general. Generally speaking, mediated agreements have better rates of compliance because the parties have come up with their own, voluntary solutions that are tailored to their particular situation. The failure of the mediated agreement to be followed, in my view, also highlights the need for the mediator to engage both parties in an exercise that I personally call, "How will this feel at Christmas". Even when it takes a bit more time to reach agreement, the parties need to be able to think about the settlement in a way that makes everyone feel, as much as possible, that a week or a year from now they won't be regretting the decision. Even if the agreement is not what they'd have chosen in an ideal world, they need to feel it is fair, that it is something they have the capacity to comply with, and that they're willing to do it. If a mediated agreement fails this reality check of "how will this feel at Christmas (or a week from now)," it's not a good agreement. If a party has doubts or misgivings and the agreement is not 100% voluntary, noncompliance is much more likely.
Of course, not everyone is going to be happy all the time, and this is why it's important for parties to mediation to be committed to mutual fairness. If a person feels the process was fair and above board, and that the agreement was fundamentally fair, they may not like it but most likely they'll find it much easier to swallow than if they feel the entire thing has been unfair and involuntary. When people go to court, don't get to air their concerns fully, and then feel as if they've had an unfair court order imposed on them, the odds of noncompliance go way up regardless of whether objectively speaking the court's order was as fair as it could possibly be.
When you hear of an agreement where parties failed to comply, or later felt the agreement was unfair, that is more a sign that the particular mediation had some error in process, not that mediation itself is unfair or ineffective. To the contrary, in general, mediation of cases saves thousands of dollars that can be kept in the family rather than paid to attorneys and court costs, results in solutions that are tailored to the parties' needs, and that parties tend to be more happy with overall.
There's a great article about the general notion of fairness, agreement, and finding a peaceful way forward after divorce in Tikkun Magazine which can be found online at: http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010peterson
