Halperin v. Halperin

Citations

• 196 Conn. App. 603

Syllabus

The plaintiff, whose marriage to the defendant previously had been dis- solved, appealed to this court from the postjudgment order of the trial court ordering him to include income derived from two entities, C Co. and I Co., in the calculation of his unallocated support obligation. Pursuant to a provision in the parties' separation agreement, which was incorporated into the dissolution judgment, the plaintiff was required to pay the defendant unallocated support, which was to be calculated using a decreasing percentage of the plaintiff's gross base income and quarterly bonuses over a twelve year schedule. That provision also provided that income for purposes of the calculation was the parties' respective total income that had ''historically been listed'' on line 22, or the equivalent, of their joint 1040 federal tax returns, and expressly included all employment, business and partnership income, but specifi- cally excluded any income received by the plaintiff from patents or inventions that he created or obtained. Following the dissolution of the parties' marriage in 2010, the plaintiff acquired ownership interests in C Co. and I Co. Thereafter, the defendant filed an amended motion for contempt, arguing that the plaintiff had underpaid her unallocated support for the years 2010 through 2013. At the hearing on the motion, the central issue before the trial court was whether, pursuant to the unallocated support provision, income that the plaintiff had earned from C Co. and I Co. and similar future income was to be included in the calculation of the unallocated support. The trial court found that the provision was ambiguous and, crediting the defendant's testimony regarding the meaning of the phrase ''historically been listed'' as used in the provision, determined that the parties intended to include the income at issue in the plaintiff's total income for purposes of determining his unallocated support obligation. Held that the plaintiff could not prevail on his claim