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Families caught up in the scheme said the experience was distressing and invasive. Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash
Around 90% of Northern Ireland families flagged as potential benefit cheats were in fact legitimate claimants, The Detail can reveal.
Hundreds of parents were targeted in a controversial anti-fraud crackdown by HMRC late last year.
UK tax authorities used faulty and incomplete Home Office travel data to incorrectly suggest 826 families had emigrated from Northern Ireland and were fraudulently claiming the support from abroad.
However, it can now be revealed that at least 742 of these were subsequently confirmed to be eligible for Child Benefit. Only 81 were determined to have been incorrectly receiving Child Benefit, while enquiries remain open in three cases.
Some of the families were caught up in the scheme after flying out on holiday from Belfast but returning via Dublin airport. The Home Office data thus showed no date of their return.
Other families returned through Belfast airport, but incomplete Home Office records did not log the journey.
This led to families being classed as having left the country and not returning, despite in many cases other HMRC records showing they continued to be employed locally.
Families caught up in the scheme said the experience was distressing and invasive.
Maria* flew out of Belfast and returned via Dublin Airport after a short family holiday in early 2025. Because there are no UK passport checks on the land border, the Home Office had no record of her return and marked her as having moved abroad.
She then received an HMRC letter informing her that her Child Benefit had been suspended and asking her to complete a 12-page form, including three months of bank statements, letters from her child’s school, and hospital records.
“I felt like I was literally in a Kafkaesque process,” said Maria, who asked us not to use her real name.
Other Belfast families who travelled to England via Dublin Airport for a cheaper holiday faced similar problems. The Home Office data showed them leaving the UK for Ireland and wrongly flagged them as having emigrated.
HMRC knew of potential problems with the scheme - figures previously obtained by The Detail showed an almost 80% error rate for Northern Ireland families during an earlier pilot of the scheme - but rolled it out anyway.
The error rate was even higher during the wider roll out in part because cross checks with PAYE records were removed.
Documents obtained by The Detail also showed that local advice groups were given little if any warning about the scheme.
Last year the chair of the Treasury committee accused HMRC of making an “egregious error” in assuming parents who had used Dublin airport to return to Northern Ireland had emigrated.
Across the UK, almost 14,000 families were found to have had their benefits suspended incorrectly by the scheme.
An internal assessment carried out before HMRC incorrectly stripped child benefit payments from thousands of families suggested that the risk of such errors was "remote" and “tolerable”.
“Sufficient oversight”
Last month an official report found that the flawed crackdown had failed to “adequately consider” the policy’s impact on claimants, some of whom suffered hardship.
The National Audit Office also found that “key decisions, such as the removal of the upfront PAYE check, were made at inappropriate levels without sufficient oversight, scrutiny and challenge.”
This was because HMRC simply didn’t have the experienced staff to do the checks and relied on inexperienced temps who were not qualified to check tax records, the report said.
In future HMRC should consider the human cost of what it acknowledged was an “innovative” scheme to crack down on fraud.
HMRC has subsequently reintroduced PAYE checks and made other changes, meaning fewer people will be sent letters in the first place, they will have longer to respond, and benefits won't be suspended in the first instance.
The agency accepted “there were weaknesses in its oversight” including the fact it “did not appoint a single senior responsible owner” of the scheme leaving key decisions “without sufficient scrutiny”.
A spokesman said they welcomed the report and that they took “swift action” to address “some mistakes [which] were made initially”
“Our work so far has prevented thousands of customers claiming incorrectly, protecting tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money,” he said.
The scheme was relaunched earlier this year.
An inquiry by Westminster's Public Accounts Committee is ongoing.