Flawed Home Office travel records identified thousands of parents suspected of claiming while living abroad
The UK’s public spending watchdog has launched an investigation into a controversial government anti-fraud scheme that resulted in thousands of families being wrongly stripped of their child benefit payments.
The National Audit Office (NAO) will examine how HM Revenue and Customs designed and implemented a scheme that used flawed Home Office travel records to identify parents suspected of living abroad while still claiming child benefit.
The inquiry follows a series of articles in the Detail and the Guardian which exposed how HMRC relied on faulty travel data which recorded outgoing journeys, including airline bookings that were never used, and frequently failed to record return journeys by holidaymakers and business travellers.
HMRC took the data in good faith from the Home Office and ended up incorrectly suggesting that families had emigrated and were fraudulently claiming the support from abroad.
