Are child support payments refundable if a paternity test later proves the children aren yours?
I would tend to say yes, as child support payments are intended to support your own children, your adopted children, or children for whom you are a legal guardian. There is a moral issue here, unfortunately. The actual father of the child or children is the one who should be contributing to their support. It is their father who actually owe you the money and it is possible the courts would see it in this light. If repaying all of the money at once is a financial burden for the mother, it might be better to defer repayment or to ask only for reasonable payments to be made so as not to cause additional hardship. If their father does show up, in person or by wallet, he has the responsibility both to pay ongoing support for the children and to repay you the money you have contributed to their support in lieu of him.
The other answers are wrong in the state of Pennsylvania. Once you have taken on the role as the father and financial provider of a child you are legally obligated to continue to support that child. I was a reporter and covered a story in which a guy seperated from his wife and found out their kid wasn’t his and in fact his former wife was living with the father but he still had to pay child support.
If you ask me, this is one of those questions that has no good answer. Technically, I agree with Red John. It is really the true biological parents that owe you the the refund. The father for helping to create the child in the first place and the mother for telling you what ultimately turned out to be a lie to get money out of you. If the mother knew that you were not the father, then that makes it even worse. However, there is another consideration here that I think is more important then the money. What about the child? In paying the child support, you accepted the roll of father regardless of the fact that the child is not genetically related to you. You in effect adopted the child. You don’t say how old the child is. So, I am going to assume that the child is not yet fully grown, but is old enough to be aware of what is going on. What are you going to do about this child who has been calling you father? Are you just going to abandon him/her? Are you going to put him/her through the
