A. INTRODUCTION
The Washington State Financial Declaration was passed by the legislature in March, 1992, as Substitute House Bill 2794. An approved form was issued and is regulated by the Office of the Administrator for the Courts through the Pattern Forms Committee. It is similar to the Domestic Relations Pattern Pleading Forms in that the general format and section numbering scheme is dictated by the Pattern Forms Committee, but the rules allow attorneys latitude to change the wording of the form, and add additional language.
With the addition of the Financial Declaration sub-program to SupportCalcTM, users have the added benefit of automatically merging information from the Child Support Worksheets generated by the regular SupportCalcTM program into the Financial Declaration form. (If you have Forms+PlusTM to produce the Domestic Relations Pattern Pleading Forms, that information can be merged as well.)
B. BEFORE ACCESSING THE FINANCIAL DECLARATION SUB-PROGRAM
Start With SupportCalcTM
Generally, you will want to begin producing a Financial Declaration by first putting your client's information into the main SupportCalcTM program. You can manually enter information into SupportCalcTM, or you can load a client file into SupportCalcTM as a way to input client information.
If you begin the Financial Declaration Sub-Program with client's information loaded into SupportCalcTM, the Financial Declaration will AUTOMATICALLY use this information.
See Chapter 5 of this manual for more information on how to load SupportCalcTM client information. (Additionally, Forms+PlusTM users should load the related Forms+PlusTM file for this client, by pressing CTRL + F5. Consult the file transfer sheets (blue sheets) for information about how to transfer information from Forms+PlusTM to SupportCalcTM.)
Do any of these situations apply to your case?
1. This is a new case, and I need the Financial Declaration right away:
Even though you may be in a hurry to produce a Financial Declaration, you may still want to start a Financial Declaration by filling in SupportCalcTM information PRIOR to accessing the SupportCalcTM/FD sub-program, especially income information if you want to use SupportCalcTM's tax analysis. The Financial Declaration sub-program AUTOMATICALLY uses any SupportCalcTM information entered just prior to entering the Financial Declaration sub-program.