Lopez vs. DOR involves a situation where section 57.105 attorney’s fees and costs are awarded as a sanction against the Department of Revenue in a misidentified paternity case. The case has a very wild factual scenario, which I commend everyone to read in its entirety. The bottom line is that DOR prosecuted a paternity action for six months after it knew or should have known that it had misidentified the putative father. The General Magistrate had initially granted the motion for fees, but the trial court substituted its own discretion and denied the award. That was error. The trial court also denied a request for additional sanctions based upon the exceptions that DOR had filed and had resulted in the trial court overruling the GM. That was also error. Lopez had done everything correctly; DOR had acted without diligence and through deception (at one of the hearings, DOR had claimed that they had a confidential affidavit attesting to the misidentification by the mother, but later that same hearing it was conceded that no such affidavit existed – the misidentification was blamed on the Sheriff because allegedly they used the first name that they found in the phonebook). Misidentification is common in DOR paternity cases, and that is often overlooked because DOR usually acts diligently when confronted with their error. In this case, they did not act diligently. Among other things, they failed to recognize that the correct putative father had filed his own paternity action while they were prosecuting against this incorrect putative father. It took them 6 months to correct the problem, which caused the wrong man to incur at least $5k in defense.