HMRC admits 71% wrongly targeted in child benefit fraud crackdown
Seven in 10 parents who had child benefit suspended in an HMRC fraud crackdown last year were in fact legitimate beneficiaries who had not emigrated, the tax authority has revealed.The chief executive of HMRC, John-Paul Marks, told the Treasury select committee that 71% of those targeted, higher than the 63% previously admitted, were in error.Marks said that “just under 5%” of the 23,700 parents who lost their child benefit were in fact fraudulent claimants.Meg Hillier, the chair of the committee, accused HMRC of causing unnecessary “pain” to innocent parents and making an “egregious error” in assuming parents who had used Dublin airport to return to Northern Ireland had emigrated.The admission shows a major system failure by HMRC, which had told the government before rolling out the scheme in July that it could save up to £350m in benefit fraud over five years.
It had piloted a scheme the previous year but used PAYE records and Home Office travel data to try to work out what parents had emigrated and were still claiming child benefit.But when the scheme was rolled out, the PAYE checks were removed, leaving incomplete Home Office travel records as the basis of the calculation of fraud.Parents said they were left frightened and stressed after they received letters telling them their benefit was being suspended with demands they answer 73 questions involving detailed medical records, school reports and bank statements to prove they were not fraudsters.The 71% error percentage is much higher than previously admitted when HRMC told the Conservative MP Andrew Snowden in a written answer before Christmas that 63% of the parents had been wrongly targeted because of flawed travel data.Hillier asked the HMRC chief why nobody had considered the pain caused to parents, after he admitted that just 5% of accounts suspended had so far proved to be fraudulent or erroneous claims from people who had emigrated.
She said HMRC should not have assumed parents in Northern Ireland were emigrating if they left for holidays or business from Belfast airport but returned via Dublin airport, an hour from the border.After an investigation by the Guardian and the Detail investigative website, it emerged that the Home Office data also included “no show” records of passengers who had not used booked flights but for various reasons including sickness or change of business plans.One parent told of how her child support was stopped after they could not make the flight after one of her children had an epileptic seizure at the departure gate.Another said she had been caught out after going to France to collect the remains of her husband who had died while abroad but the Home Office had no record of her return journey.Hillier said she was puzzled as to why HMRC decided to strip people of child benefits and then do PAYE crosschecks later.
Marks said the PAYE checks had been reinstated,“We’ve apologised for making that error,” he said,Hillier said “one of the things that appalled” her about the fiasco was what happened to parents in Northern Ireland who had used Dublin airport for their travel and HMRC should have known about “issues about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic,“This seems to me an egregious error from a UK government department,” she told Marks,Marks told the committee that 17,048 of the 23,794 parents were stripped of benefit in error.
Of the 23,700 accounts that were suspended “about 1,109”, which is “just under 5%”, were “determined non-compliance” but of the 5,600 inquiries still open it expected the figure to increase.He said he expected that between 30% and 50% of those who would be targeted in future would be wrongfully claiming benefit from abroad.Asked by Hillier why HMRC had decided not to use PAYE checks, which had been used in the pilot scheme in 2024, he said it had thought it could “streamline” the anti-fraud operation by introducing the PAYE check “at the point of where there was a considerative decision rather than upfront”.
Finn Russell ready for bruising clash with Scotland colleagues against Edinburgh
Finn Russell is braced for a potentially bruising reunion with his Scottish international teammates but is intent on winning the “bragging rights” when Bath host Edinburgh on Friday in their Champions Cup pool decider. Russell has already messaged Duhan van der Merwe to warn him to expect a tough night and says the English champions are seeking to sharpen their attacking game in pursuit of a crucial home draw for the knockout phase.With the victorious side at the Rec set to top pool 2, the Scottish playmaker is anticipating a physical examination from an Edinburgh team he knows extremely well. “I’d imagine there’ll be a couple of late shots and being held on the ground which is always the case when you’re against your old side,” said Russell, who spent the first half of his professional career at Glasgow.“I’m not sure what the weather will be like but if it’s like it is now there’ll be a lot of balls going up in the air
Sport England suspends X social media account and takes aim at Elon Musk
Sport England has revealed that it has suspended its account on X, because the social media platform “increasingly promotes and monetises an environment that is hostile to women and girls”.In a blog post explaining the decision the Sport England chair, Chris Boardman, criticised X’s AI platform tool, Grok, saying it had “contributed to the amplification of and worse, normalisation of, misogynistic content”.“That runs directly counter to what we stand for,” said Boardman, who sits at the heart of a funding agency that invests £250m a year in grassroots sport and community projects. Regarding the decision to withdraw from X, he also pointed to the fact members of the England women’s football squad were attacked on the platform last summer. “Sport should always be a place where everyone feels safe and welcome,” he said
Ian Balding obituary
The racehorse trainer Ian Balding, who has died aged 87, saddled 1,755 winners on the flat, of which 123 were in Group races of the highest class. Yet across his four-decade career there was one horse that stood out above all others – the great Mill Reef, who won the Derby and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1971.Like most trainers worth their salt, Balding was prepared to acknowledge his good fortune in coming across such an extraordinary horse. But even though Mill Reef was special from the outset, the colt still had to be expertly managed.After winning the Greenham Stakes at Newbury in April 1971 and then the Derby at Epsom with ease that June, the three-year-old Mill Reef, ridden by Geoff Lewis, progressed to win the Eclipse Stakes and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes in the following months, before going on to tackle the Arc at the conclusion of a very long season in October
Frustrated Raducanu held up by rain with match suspended overnight in Hobart
Emma Raducanu cut a frustrated figure on Tuesday at the Hobart International as her first round match was suspended for the night due to rain with the Briton struggling to hold on to her precarious 6-3, 2-4 lead against Camila Osorio of Colombia.Raducanu, the top seed in Hobart, will return to the court on Wednesday afternoon hoping to close out her first win of the season. She lost her only match of 2026 to Maria Sakkari at the United Cup mixed-team competition last week. Afterwards, Raducanu explained how her pre-season had been badly disrupted by the foot injury she had been struggling with since she prematurely ended her 2025 season in October. The 22-year-old only began to play points and move properly in her training sessions once she arrived in Australia at the end of December
Team GB target record-breaking medal haul at 2026 Winter Olympics
Team GB believe they can achieve “the greatest Olympic performance we have ever seen at a winter Games” and are targeting a record-breaking eight medals next month in Milan-Cortina.That bullish prediction is significantly higher than Britain’s previous best of five medals, secured in Sochi in 2014 and Pyeongchang in 2018. And while the Covid-affected Games in Beijing in 2022 were a disappointment, with just two curling medals, officials are confident the team can soar to fresh heights in Italy.“We are in the strongest position we have ever been going into a Games from a world championship performance perspective,” said Dr Kate Baker, director of performance and people at UK Sport. “There is lots to be excited about
40 years on, did Proposition 48 protect US college sports – or punish Black athletes?
When the NCAA tied eligibility to standardized test scores in 1986, hundreds of recruits were barred from competition. But its legacy is still a subject of debateTony Rice noticed the looks and smirks during his first week of freshman classes in the fall of 1986 at Notre Dame.He had accepted his fate a few months earlier when standardized test results led to the decision that he would not be eligible to participate in collegiate sports his freshman year. But nothing prepared him for this.“People were looking at me,” Rice says
Labour revives Northern Powerhouse Rail project with pledge of £45bn funds
Only shoppers can save a nation of shopkeepers | Letters
Musk’s AI tool Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth says
Can X be banned under UK law and what are the other options?
The hidden hierarchy of tennis practice courts: ‘I was back in the park, smelling the weed’
Pittsburgh Steelers part ways with head coach Mike Tomlin after 19 seasons