HMRC anti-fraud scheme that wrongly cut child benefits to resume

A controversial government anti-fraud scheme that incorrectly stripped thousands of parents of their child benefit is to resume, despite ongoing concerns about inaccurate Home Office travel data on which the crackdown is based.
HMRC used flawed Home Office travel records to deduce that thousands of parents who went on holiday or work trips abroad were fraudsters, with 23,800 families having child benefit payments stopped late last year.
It was later discovered that the Home Office failed to record their return journeys and, in some cases, had incorrectly recorded people as leaving the country even though they had not boarded flights they had booked..
These included a woman whose child became ill at the departure gate, and other people who made business trip bookings but then changed their plans without cancelling the outward journey.
About 13,800 households were later found to have had their benefits suspended incorrectly, with 40% of families found to be ineligible for their benefit. Five hundred cases remain unresolved.
The final “success rate” of 40% was revealed on 13 March by the HMRC permanent secretary John-Paul Marks to the Treasury committee.
He indicated they would remain on a watching brief until May, before resuming a full fraud crackdown using Home Office data.
Marks said: “We intend to keep case opening volumes low until May to reassure ourselves that the process is working well before increasing volumes.”
The committee began investigating the issues after a joint investigation by the Detail and the Guardian. In January, Marks told the committee that at least 71% of the claims were suspended incorrectly. He has now revised that figure to 59%, writing: “Through our assurance work, we discovered that we had underestimated the effectiveness of our compliance activity.”
Unlike the DWP or other departments, HMRC does not break down how many claims were fraud or error.
Marks also said the number of errors in Northern Ireland had been revised. The issue first emerged there as holidaymakers travelled via Dublin airport, where the Home Office has no access to data.
“The corrected number of customers resident within Northern Ireland is around 800, whereas we had previously reported 346,” he said.
While HMRC said the scheme was not paused, it was halted as the original scheme backfired.
Dan Tomlinson MP said, in several written parliamentary questions, that no new cases were opened between at least 31 October and 31 December, after the press exposed the high number of people living and working in the UK who had their benefit stopped.
HMRC admitted one factor was the failure to cross-check targets with its own PAYE records. It has since said it will check PAYE records before contacting people and will not stop child benefit until claimants have had the chance to verify their details.
However, there are still concerns that it uses Home Office data that is known to be incomplete. PAYE checks, for example, do not cover the self-employed, those on benefits, or those who may go on holiday or make a booking they do not keep, who are erroneously recorded as never going back by the Home Office.
Internal documents, obtained by the Detail news site, show officials regarded the data-sharing scheme as a success even as thousands of payments were wrongly suspended and most claimants were later found to be eligible.
The document read: “The exchange of data between HMRC and the Home Office continues to work as expected and agreed, and we still expect that the inquiry process will find about 64% of cases ineligible [for child benefit].”
In October 2025, representatives from an advice group contacted HMRC officials after journalists began asking questions about claims being suspended based on flight records.
Parents had complained that they were frightened and stressed after receiving the original letters suspending their benefit and demanding answers to 73 questionsinvolving medical records, school reports and bank statements.
Conservative MP Andrew Snowden MP who has been calling for more answers from the government said he was surprised the crackdown was resuming while so many questions remained.
“The first iteration of this scheme had disastrous consequences for many families and the government have still not come clean on what went wrong, and most importantly, what lessons were learned to ensure the same failings don’t happen again,” he said.
He said he would “strongly urge the government to think again” until the National Audit Office investigation was complete.
HMRC confirmed to advice groups that they had instructed customer services to offer a “change in tone”.