Parents have spoken out about the “massive mess” which saw their child benefit payments wrongly stopped after they went on holiday.
The UK’s public spending watchdog has launched an investigation into major errors in an anti-fraud initiative affecting more than 13,000 claimants.
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) used Home Office data to stop payments between August and October last year because families were thought to be living abroad.
The tax authority suspected parents were fraudulently claiming child benefit after moving overseas, based on flawed travel information.
Ellen Edwards and her husband Kevin had their payments for 10-year-old son William stopped after the family went to Cyprus for a week in early May.
In October, five months after returning to the UK, Edwards received a letter from HMRC telling her that the £25-a-week child benefit would be suspended.
The letter said travel information showed that her son had not returned to the UK. Edwards was stunned at the mistake, since her son’s passport had been stamped when coming back into the country.
‘It was very strange and stressful’
“I was alarmed that their priority seemed to be money and not safety,” the 51-year-old, from Walsall Wood, told The i Paper.
“Because why would we as parents have gone on holiday and not returned with our 10-year-old child?
“We rang them [HMRC] and someone said, ‘Your child hasn’t come back – you will have to fill this form out’. I was told they had information from the Home Office.”
“They told us to prove that he had returned with us,” said Edwards.
“They wanted all this information – proof of him at school, his medical records, so much information. It was crazy. They asked for bank statements going back to before we went on holiday.”
“It was very strange and stressful,” she added. “It was a massive mess.”
HMRC has since apologised and backdated the payment (Photo: mattjeacock/Getty).Edwards received a letter from HMRC in November acknowledging that there had been a mistake and apologising.
The family missed out on two months’ worth of payments, around £200, before the child benefit was reinstated and backdated, she added.
“Thankfully it didn’t affect us for too long,” Edwards said. “It can cause hardship for some families to miss those payments.”
“I think it’s right there is an investigation,” she said on the NAO’s decision to probe the anti-fraud scheme.
“There are privacy issues there – to asked for so much private information after going on holiday is weird.”
‘Troubling lack of transparency’ on what went wrong
Meg Hillier, Labour chair of the Treasury select committee, said HMRC had inflicted unnecessary “pain” on parents who had done nothing wrong.
The tax authority has apologised to parents affected by “mistakes” and said it had taken “swift action” to put things right.
In all, HMRC suspended child benefit payments for 23,800 families between August and October as part of an attempted anti-fraud crackdown.
Some 13,700 of these claimants were entitled to benefit all along, the tax authority revealed in a letter to the Treasury select committee earlier this week.
A group of 9,600 families were found to have been incorrectly receiving the benefit. And around 500 families are still waiting for their cases to be resolved.
Conservative MP Andrew Snowden – who had asked a series of questions in parliament about the issue – said he welcomed the NAO investigation.
Snowden said there had been a “troubling lack of transparency” about how the anti-fraud policy was designed, and what kind of data was relied upon.
Some families ‘too scared to apply for benefits’
Campaigners at Privacy International said it was a “clear example of how function creep by a government’s surveillance machinery results in real-world harms for people”.
The Turn2us charity, which helps people who are struggling financially, said such benefit errors can cause “real hardship”.
Shelley Hopkinson, head of policy, said they heard from people who are too “scared” to engage with the benefit system “because they are worried about being accused of doing something wrong”.
An NAO spokesperson said it was carrying out a “factual review” of the scheme aimed at tackling child benefit fraud. It will be published in the summer.
A HMRC spokesperson said: “Around £270m of child benefit payments were incorrectly claimed in 2024-25, with unreported residency changes a leading cause, so action was needed.”
They added: “We acknowledge some mistakes were made as we expanded this exercise, but we’ve apologised to those affected and took swift action to put things right.”
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