HMRC to review suspension of child benefit payments to 23,500 people
HMRC is reviewing decisions to remove child benefit payments from 23,500 people after concluding that individuals had emigrated from the UK using travel data.
This benefit is normally stopped if a person lives outside the UK for more than eight weeks, but many affected people have complained about the tax authority stopping their payments after they went abroad on holiday.
It comes after the government launched a new crackdown on child benefit fraud as part of a bid to save £350 million over the next five years.
The piloted system allows HMRC to use the Home Office’s international travel data to assess whether people are still living in the UK.
But all affected cases are now being reviewed following a growing number of complaints from people who left the UK for a short period and returned to find their payments had been stopped.
The problem was first detected in Northern Ireland after some families flew from the UK in Belfast and crossed the border back to Dublin in the EU before returning home.
According to the Guardian, almost half of the families initially flagged as immigrants were still living in the UK.
The newspaper reported that the scheme saved HMRC £17 million but left 46 per cent of targeted families wrongly suspected of fraud.
It was incorrectly stated that 78 per cent in Northern Ireland had not returned from trips abroad. While approximately 129 families were marked as having left the country during the pilot, only 28 families had left the country.
HMRC said Guard It will no longer use data on travel through Dublin airport to assess fraud, as it is now part of the common travel area, and will not withhold benefits before cross-checking with the relevant person and looking at their PAYE records.
The decision to review the system came after MPs on the Treasury Select Committee demanded a response from the tax office.
A spokesman for HMRC said: “We are very sorry to those whose payments were incorrectly suspended. We took immediate action to update the process and gave customers one month to respond before payments were suspended.”
“We are committed to protecting taxpayers’ money and are confident that most of the suspensions are correct.”
