How to Complete a Georgia Income Verification Form: Affidavit, DFCS, and DCSS

In Georgia, the income verification form you need depends on who is asking. For divorce, custody, or child support cases, courts require the Domestic Relations Financial Affidavit under O.C.G.A. § 19-6-15, filed with a Child Support Worksheet from the state’s online calculator. For SNAP, TANF, or other public benefits, the Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) runs its own verification process built around Form 809 (Wage Verification Form) and third-party documentation. There is no single universal Georgia income verification form.

Which Form Applies to Your Situation

Start by identifying why your income is being verified. The paperwork, the standards, and the submission process all change with the context.

Domestic Relations Financial Affidavit. Required in child support, divorce, and custody cases. A fillable version is available from the Georgia Division of Child Support Services (DCSS). This is what most people mean when they search for a Georgia income verification form.¹
Child Support Worksheet. Generated by the Georgia Child Support Commission’s online calculator. Courts expect it filed alongside the Financial Affidavit in any child support case.²
Form 809 (Wage Verification Form). Used by DFCS to verify earned income for TANF, SNAP, and related programs. Your caseworker sends it to your employer or asks you to deliver it.³
Income Withholding for Support (IWO). Sent to employers after a child support order is in place. Parents do not fill this out; DCSS handles it.

If your case is in court, the rest of this guide focuses on the Financial Affidavit. If you are applying for or renewing public benefits, skip to the DFCS section below.

What to Gather Before You Start

Pull your documents together first. For the Financial Affidavit you need, at minimum, your two most recent pay stubs (the form requires them as attachments), your most recent tax return, and documentation of any non-wage income such as investment statements, benefit award letters, or rental records.

If you are self-employed, add your last three years of federal and state tax returns, any K-1s from partnership or S-corp income, a current profit-and-loss statement, and bank statements showing business deposits. The statute specifically describes tax returns as reliable evidence of income.⁴

What Counts as Gross Income

Georgia defines gross income broadly: all income from any source, before deductions, whether earned or unearned. The Financial Affidavit asks you to report across more than twenty categories, and leaving something out can lead the court to impute income at a higher figure.⁴

Employment income: salaries, commissions, fees, tips, bonuses, overtime, and severance.
Investment and passive income: interest, dividends, trust income, annuities, capital gains, and rental income.
Government benefits: Social Security disability or retirement, VA disability, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance.
Other sources: lawsuit judgments, cash gifts, prizes, lottery winnings, alimony received from someone not involved in the current case, and assets used to support the family.

Fringe benefits trip people up. If your employer provides perks that meaningfully reduce your living expenses, such as a company car, housing, or paid meals, those count toward gross income.⁴ Means-tested public assistance such as TANF and food stamps is explicitly excluded.¹

Filling Out the Financial Affidavit

Personal and Family Information

The top of the form asks for your name and age, your spouse’s name and age, dates of marriage and separation, and the names, birth dates, and current living arrangements of all children, including children from other relationships you support. This establishes the family structure the court applies the guidelines to.

Gross Monthly Income (Section 3A)

Section 3A is where most of the work happens. Report your gross monthly income broken into individual line items: salary or wages, commissions, bonuses, overtime, self-employment income, rental income, and every other category the statute lists. Each line needs a dollar amount. If a category does not apply, enter zero rather than leaving it blank.

When your income varies because of seasonal work, fluctuating hours, or irregular commissions, average it. Pull at least four consecutive recent pay stubs, add the gross amounts, divide by the number of stubs for an average per pay period, multiply by the number of pay periods in a year (52 for weekly, 26 for biweekly), and divide by 12.

Net Monthly Income (Section 3B)

Section 3B asks for net monthly income from employment after deducting only federal and state income taxes and FICA. Do not subtract health insurance premiums, retirement contributions, or other voluntary deductions here. The form limits this line to taxes and FICA. You also report your pay frequency and the number of exemptions you claim.

Assets, Expenses, and Creditors

Section 4 covers assets: bank accounts, retirement accounts, real estate, vehicles, life insurance cash values, stocks, and other property. For each item, list the value and indicate whether it is separate property of either spouse. Section 5 covers monthly expenses (housing, transportation, children’s costs, personal expenses) plus payments to creditors. These sections give the court the full financial picture it uses when deciding whether to deviate from the presumptive child support amount.

Self-Employment and Business Income

Self-employed parents face extra scrutiny because their income is harder to verify from the outside. For self-employment income, the form directs you to report gross receipts minus ordinary and necessary expenses required to produce that income, and to attach a separate sheet showing your calculations.¹

The statute is specific about what does not count as a legitimate business expense: excessive travel, promotional costs, personal living expenses, home office costs, accelerated depreciation, and investment tax credits.⁴ Bank statements showing business deposits can supplement your tax records, especially when your most recent return doesn’t reflect current earnings. Pair them with invoices or contracts that explain where the deposits came from.

If a parent claims minimal income but drives an expensive car or lives in a home that doesn’t match that figure, the court can factor the inconsistency in when deciding whether the numbers add up.⁴

What Happens If You Don’t Provide Income Evidence

Under O.C.G.A. § 19-6-15(f)(4), if a parent fails to produce reliable evidence of income and the court has no other way to determine earning capacity, the court can impute income based on that parent’s education, skills, and work history.⁴

Modification cases carry a steeper penalty. When a parent with an existing order refuses to produce income evidence, the court can increase that parent’s assumed gross income by at least 10 percent per year for every year since the last order was entered or modified.⁴ A parent who dodges a review for three years could see assumed income inflated by more than 30 percent.

Imputation also applies when a parent is voluntarily unemployed or underemployed. The court weighs past employment, education and training, health, assets inconsistent with claimed income, and whether a caretaker role legitimately prevents full-time work. Incarceration is the one situation where the court cannot find voluntary unemployment.

Income Verification for SNAP, TANF, and Other DFCS Benefits

The DFCS process is different from the court system. For earned income, DFCS works through a priority order: automated systems like the Eligibility Income Verification System (EIVS) first, then pay stubs, then employer-provided documentation, and finally Form 809 as the agency’s own wage verification form.³

For unearned income such as Social Security, child support received, or unemployment, DFCS accepts award letters less than 12 months old, written statements from the paying agency, copies of checks with stubs, or Form 139 (Contribution Statement). A copy of a check without the stub is not accepted.³

If income cannot be verified through any third-party source and you have cooperated with every previous verification attempt, DFCS will accept your own written statement as a last resort, but only after documenting that every other method failed.

Where to File and Submit

Financial Affidavit and Child Support Worksheet

File the Domestic Relations Financial Affidavit with the court handling your case, usually the Superior Court in your county, or the court that issued the original order for a modification. The affidavit is signed under oath, so you need to sign in front of a notary public. File it alongside the Child Support Worksheet produced by the calculator at csconlinecalc.georgiacourts.gov.² The income figures on the two documents must match. A $5,200 gross monthly figure on the affidavit paired with $4,800 on the worksheet will prompt the judge to question both.

For modifications, prepare a larger package: three years of federal and state tax returns, W-2s and 1099s, twelve months of pay stubs, recent statements for liquid asset accounts, and any loan applications or financial statements you have used in the past three years. Include entity tax returns if you hold a 30 percent or greater interest in a corporation, partnership, or trust.

DFCS Submissions

Upload verification documents to Georgia Gateway whenever possible; DFCS recommends it for faster processing.⁵ Without internet access, mail documents to your local county DFCS office rather than the central state office.

DCSS Correspondence

If DCSS has requested income information from you directly, outside a court filing, mail documents to:

Division of Child Support Services
Director’s Communication Group
2910 Miller Road, Suite 200
Decatur, Georgia 30035⁶

Penalties for False or Incomplete Reporting

The Financial Affidavit is signed under oath. Knowingly providing false information is false swearing under Georgia law, punishable by a fine up to $1,000, imprisonment between one and five years, or both. A court that discovers inaccurate reporting can also reopen and recalculate support obligations retroactively, and the parent who misrepresented their finances loses credibility on every other issue in the case.

Unintentional errors also cause problems. When the numbers on your affidavit don’t match your pay stubs or tax returns, opposing counsel will flag it. At best you file an amended affidavit and explain. At worst the court draws negative inferences about everything else you reported. Check every figure against the source documents before you sign.

1
Georgia Department of Human Services Division of Child Support Services. Domestic Relations Financial Affidavit
2
Georgia Child Support Commission. Georgia Child Support Calculator
3
Division of Family and Children Services. 1525 Income
4
Justia. Georgia Code 19-6-15 – Child Support Guidelines for Determining Amount of Award
5
Georgia Department of Human Services Division of Family & Children Services. Contact Information
6
Division of Child Support Services. Customer Service