The Cabinet Office has announced the creation of a specialist team to crack down on fraud and error related to Child Benefit claimants who have left the country and are no longer entitled to funds.
It said the project, created in conjunction with the Public Sector Fraud Authority, is expected to save more than £350m over the course of five years.
The move follows a successful pilot that has already removed 2,600 people from the Child Benefit system who had left the UK but continued to claim. The pilot project was run by just 15 investigators who stopped £17m of wrong payments in less than 12 months.
From next month a 200-strong team will be using international travel data to track whether Child Benefit claimants have gone overseas for long enough to mean their entitlement to payments has ceased. The Cabinet Office said the drive would see the benefit being stripped from tens of thousands of people who have moved abroad.
Child Benefit is currently paid to just under 7 million families and is intended to support nearly 12 million children. It is worth £25.05 a week for a first child and £17.25 a week for any further children.
If a claimant is outside the UK for more than eight weeks, Child Benefit payments may stop unless there are exceptional circumstances. Claimants are required to inform HM Revenue and Customs, which is responsible for administering the benefit, if they will be out of the UK for that period of time or longer.
Parliamentary secretary to the Cabinet Office Georgia Gould said the clampdown on fraud and error in Child Benefit payments was a necessary step for protecting taxpayers’ money.
“This government is putting a stop to people claiming benefits when they aren’t eligible to do so,” she said.
“From September, we’ll have 10 times as many investigators saving hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money.
“If you’re claiming benefits you’re not entitled to, your time is up.”
The Cabinet Office said that as well as addressing fraud and error, the Child Benefit drive was also about raising awareness of the rules – and recognising that some errors were genuine mistakes.
It said every case flagged by the new checking system would be reviewed by a human investigator and that HMRC will reach out directly to families as part of any investigation to resolve matters swiftly.
The pilot that paved the way for the clampdown was conducted by PSFA, the Home Office and HMRC. It used powers in the Digital Economy Act 2017 to match a random sample of 200,000 Child Benefit records with international travel data.
Where 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.