My question involves child support in the State of: Florida
My husband was given custody of his minor daughter in November2004. We had papers filed through the court and the proceedings were done by a hired attorney in which we paid $2500 to. Before he was given custody he had a court ordered obligation to pay child support for his minor child which he paid through payroll deduction. After we were granted temporary custody we decided to move to the state of Tennessee. We contatcted our attorney to inform him of this move and get the custody issue permanent in the court. Our attorney told us that all we needed to do was notify his ex wife of the move and after we moved and lived in the state of Tennessee for 6 months that the state of TN would take over jusrisdiction and his my husbands ex-wife ever wanted to fight for custody to be changed back to her she would have to come to TN. We knew that would never happen so we left it at that. During the time we had custody of his daughter we didn not continue to pay his ex wife child support nor did we ask her to pay child support! In November of 2009 his minor child decided she wanted to go back to FL to live with her mother this was 6 months prior to her 18th birthday and when she would also graduate from high school. We let her go back to FL and about 10 days later we received a letter in the mail from FL child support office stateing we were approximately $74,000 in arrears for child support, we immediately contacted the child support office and our attorney in FL to have this situation resolved. After talking to our attorney we assumed he had handled it because we stopped receiving notifications. Then in December of 2010 we received a letter from the IRS stating they were going to intercept our tax return due to unpaid child support, I immediately contatcted our attorney again who assured me he would get it fixed. To be safe we filed taxes seperately. In April of 2011 we received a letter from FL child support office stating that they have records indicating that we had custody of the minor child but not court order stopping the child support. I gave the letter to my husband to call them and find out what we had to do t o get this handled once and for all! Yesterday I went to go use my debit card and my card was declined! I had just enough cash on me to pay for the transaction so I paid cash and left. I got online and checked my bank account to find it overdrawn almost $78,000! I figured it was some sort of mistake and called my bank immediately to find that there was a garnishment attached to our account and our account was frozen! First thing this morning I called our attorney in FL and told them what was going on and was told that they would do some research and get back to us! In the meantime my husband got on the phone with the dept of revenue, child support office and anyone else he could. We found out that our attorney never filed papers to have the child support abated since custody changed hands.We had no idea this was something that needed to be done that is what we were paying an attorney for! We are finding out that we could possibly have the freeze lifted if these papers are filed! I called our attorney back and explained to them what the dept of revenue has told us and they said they "are working on it"! They had 7 years to work on it and now I can't wait another minute for them to work on it! This is our only bank account in which our paychecks are direct deposited into and even though we have stopped our direct deposits that won't help us for 2 weeks since we get paid this week! In the meantime we have NO access to ANY money, we have no credit cards or anything. Our utility bills were paid out of that account and they had not cleared the bank yet so I'm afraid that they will cut our utilities off in the next day or so and we have 3 children under the age of 11.
My question is how can we file these abatement papers ourselves to try and get this resolved??? I don't know that we can trust that this attorney will get it done for us since he didn't do it in the first place.

