A new specialist team will use international travel data to track if claimants have gone overseas, resulting in them no longer entitled to the payments
The UK Government has declared that Child Benefit will be withdrawn from tens of thousands of individuals who have relocated overseas, in a significant crackdown projected to save £350 million over the next five years.
A new specialist team will utilise international travel data to determine if claimants have moved abroad, thereby disqualifying them from receiving the payments.
This action comes after a successful trial which has already eliminated 2,600 people from the system who had departed the UK but continued to claim Child Benefit.
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The payments, administered by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), amount to £26.05 per week – or £1,354.60 annually – for the eldest or only child and £17.25 per week – or £897 yearly – for each additional child.
A small team of just 15 investigators have already successfully stopped approximately £17 million from being wrongly paid out in less than 12 months.
The UK Government has announced plans to rapidly expand this highly effective unit as part of the Plan for Change. The new team, set to comprise over 200 people from next month, sends a stern warning to those attempting to defraud the system.
Cabinet Office Minister Georgia Gould stated: “This government is putting a stop to people claiming benefits when they aren’t eligible to do so.
“From September, we’ll have ten times as many investigators saving hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money. f you’re claiming benefits you’re not entitled to, your time is up.”
Child Benefit, supporting 11.9m children and paid to over 6.9 million families, is one of the most widely accessed forms of benefit in the UK, reports the Daily Record. However, if a claimant is outside the UK for more than eight weeks, Child Benefit payments may stop unless there are exceptional circumstances.
Claimants must inform HMRC if they are outside the UK for this length of time or longer. The Public Sector Fraud Authority, the Home Office and HMRC carried out the pilot.
Under the Digital Economy Act, they matched a random sample of 200,000 Child Benefit records with international travel data.
If the data suggested a claimant had left the country, specialist investigators from HMRC stepped in to perform their own checks before deciding whether benefits were being claimed incorrectly.
The pilot was concluded in under 12 months and delivered savings of over one million pounds per investigator. Alongside tougher checks, this renewed drive will raise awareness of the rules, recognising that some errors are genuine mistakes.
Every case is reviewed by a human investigator and HMRC will reach out directly to families as part of any investigation to resolve matters swiftly.
This crackdown on fraud and error protects hardworking families who play by the rules and ensures every pound of taxpayer money goes where it should.