"said Dame Meg Hillier, the chair of the influential parliamentary committee. I'm afraid, though, that it appears they have been cavalier with people's finances, making the arbitrary decision to remove necessary checks and causing a mess they are now forced to clean up. She added that a decision by HMRC not to cross-check faulty travel data it had received from the Home Office against tax records was a costly error."
"In a letter to the committee yesterday, HMRC chief executive John-Paul Marks revealed that, up to 31 October, 3,673 out of 23,795 parents wrongly suspected of emigration had their eligibility to continue receiving child benefit confirmed. The debacle unfolded after HMRC took Home Office travel data including airline, ferry and Eurotunnel bookings that purported to show just under 24,000 people had left the country and not come back."
"An investigation by the Guardian and investigative website The Detail found last month that at least 2,000 of the parents who had their benefits stopped had simply gone on holidays or work trips, and their return journeys were not recorded by the Home Office. Among those accused of having emigrated was a woman who could not go on holiday because one of her children had an epileptic seizure at the departure gate."
Nearly 4,000 parents had child benefit stopped after being wrongly flagged as emigrants when HMRC relied on Home Office travel bookings. HMRC removed cross-checks and used airline, ferry and Eurotunnel data that suggested just under 24,000 people had left the country. HMRC later confirmed 3,673 of 23,795 suspected parents remained eligible for child benefit. An investigation found at least 2,000 affected parents had merely made holidays or work trips whose returns were not recorded. Cases included a parent prevented from travelling by a child's epileptic seizure and a Ukrainian carer threatened with repayment demands. Senior officials will face parliamentary scrutiny.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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