A woman has had her child benefit stopped after booking a holiday to Italy because HMRC inferred she had emigrated – even though she and her family did not board the flight.
Sally, her three children and her partner were going on holiday to Italy last July, but were refused boarding after one of the children had an epileptic seizure at the departure gate.
Sixteen months later, Sally received a letter from tax authorities at HMRC telling her payments for all three children were being stopped as records showed she had taken a one-way flight from the UK to Italy in 2024.
“We never even left the country,” she said, explaining how much paperwork she has had to put together to prove to the tax authorities that they had made a mistake.
“On receiving the letter, I called the child benefit line and explained the situation but was told I needed to complete the form and submit evidence, which included three months of bank statements from all my accounts, letters from the NHS and school to prove we returned – when we didn’t even leave.
“We instead sent a letter from the airline stating that we did not fly, together with letters detailing the insurance claim. I called again this Monday and was told I should hear of the outcome by December.”
Like thousands of others who have received these letters in the past four weeks, Sally said she could not believe that as a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen, she had been forced to prove a negative – that she was not a fraudster – simply because the Home Office did not have full records.
“It is very frustrating. Surely the cost of sorting out this mess is going to far exceed the amount of benefits they suspended,” she said.
In the past few weeks, 23,500 people have received letters from HMRC as part of a crackdown on child benefit fraud launched by then Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould in August.
Earlier this week, another woman told how her benefit had been stopped after she and her family had booked a flight from London to Oslo, even though she never checked in after the wedding she was going to was cancelled. Tax authorities told her their records showed she had emigrated.
One woman, Alex, had her benefits cut off even though she opted out of the payments years ago.
“We voluntarily opted out of receiving the child benefit payments in 2021 [due to income thresholds], yet they still threatened to stop paying them,” she said. “This set alarm bells off for me as I thought someone could have been fraudulently claiming them on our behalf.
“As many others, we too went away in April 2025. We went as a family for two weeks, returning with BA on a return ticket, encountering border control on both sides both ways and we have stamps in our passports to show this.”
She has now filed a formal complaint with HMRC about its records. “I am concerned about how and where is HMRC accessing personal information about people and really shocked by the aggressive approach targeting tax-paying families,” she said.
HMRC has apologised twice this week for the errors, saying it would cross-check benefit payments with PAYE records and not suspend child benefit until it had first approached a customer to check if they were legitimate recipients.
“We’re very sorry to those whose payments have been suspended incorrectly,” it said. “Anyone affected should call the dedicated number on the letter we’ve sent them so we can confirm their eligibility and reinstate payments.”
“We will no longer suspend any payments until we have checked with the recipient first, giving them a month to confirm if they are still eligible. This strikes the right balance between protecting taxpayers’ money and ensuring payments are only suspended when appropriate.”
They piloted the scheme earlier this summer on 200,000 citizens and it is not clear if flags on false data were raised or whether anyone at HMRC voiced concerns about the human impact of mistakes.
HMRC’s website said they estimated that they could save between £10m and £30m a year by stopping fraud by those out of the country for more than eight weeks.
The crackdown was based on Home Office border data, but the experiences of some of those impacted suggest the Home Office has also used passenger bookings data from airlines without cross-checking actual flights taken.
The Home Office has been approached to explain the robustness of data it passed to HMRC and what legal basis it would have if it used airline booking information.
Dozens of cases shared with the Guardian show people who had flown in and out of the same airport did not have their return journey recorded at the border.
There also appeared to be issues for passengers flying out of one airport and returning through another, and those returning via Eurostar or via a ferry.
In Northern Ireland, child benefits were stopped for more than 300 passengers, some of whom had exited the UK on holiday via Belfast, but returned via Dublin Airport.
Asked if it collected passenger data from airlines the Home Office said it “did not typically hold advance passenger information from carriers for individuals who have booked travel but did not check in”.
The text and caption of this article were amended on 31 October 2025. Georgia Gould was a Cabinet Office minister, not a cabinet minister, when she launched the crackdown.
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