HM Revenue and Customs

4. Mr A complains the CMS did not properly investigate his complaint that he was wrongly asked to pay child maintenance from 2009 as a result of his wife fraudulently saying his daughter was still in full-time education and living at home. He complains this meant he was wrongly told he owed three years of maintenance.

5. Mr A complains both the CMS and HMRC failed to investigate this in 2017, after the CMS told him it would seek a court order for forced sale of his home to recover the disputed money.

6. He complains the payments he had to make in 2017, including costs and interest, could have been avoided if the CMS had investigated whether he still had to pay maintenance and HMRC had investigated his report of child benefit fraud. He also complains the CMS behaved in an inappropriate and threatening way in asking him for the money. He said this caused a huge amount of unnecessary stress.

7. Mr A is seeking reimbursement of the maintenance he says he should not have had to pay and would like the CMS to change its approach to asking people to pay money.

8. Mr A’s ex-partner applied to the CMS (then called the Child Support Agency) in 2005. It said Mr A was responsible for paying maintenance for his youngest daughter. The CMS has since then replaced the Child Support Agency and taken over all its responsibilities.

9. Mr A did not agree to pay maintenance. The CMS began to take steps to enforce its decision, and in August 2008, Mr A paid £1,740 for maintenance up to that date.

10. During 2009, the CMS established that Mr A worked out of the country on short-term engineering contracts but remained a UK resident. The CMS struggled to establish his actual earnings so made assessments based on estimates from the information it could gather.

11. Mr A disputed that he should pay maintenance for that entire period, and in March 2011 he told it he thought he should not pay maintenance for his daughter after 2009 because he thought her eligibility for child benefit had ended.

12. The CMS began taking steps to enforce its decision in April 2011 and the county court decided Mr A owed £19,450 for the period June 2008 to February 2011. However, after this the CMS accepted that the information it had about his earnings was not likely to be accurate. As part of the reassessment of the maintenance he owed, it reduced his liability to zero.

13. Mr A’s ex-wife appealed the decision that he had zero liability before the Child Support Tribunal. The Tribunal wrote to Mr A in November 2012 to ask for information about his earnings. It did not receive a response and decided estimates relevant to his profession should be used. A new calculation of what Mr A was sent to him in August 2013, asking him to pay £17,422.

14. The CMS wrote to Mr A in November 2014 and April and August 2015 asking him to pay the maintenance it had calculated in 2013. In February 2016 the CMS began taking steps to enforce its decision. It applied to the court for permission to collect the maintenance it said he owed when he sold his house. The court agreed to that order, and in January 2017 the CMS applied for an order of sale. This means he would have to sell his property unless he was able to pay the maintenance the CMS said he owed.

15. Mr A contacted the CMS several times in 2017 to challenge the assessment of what the CMS wanted him to pay. His MP also helped him get information from and make complaints to the CMS and HMRC. Mr A did not persuade the courts he should not be forced to sell his property and, in December 2017, he paid the CMS the amount it said he had to pay.

Fraud reports in 2011/2015

18. Mr A believes he should not have paid maintenance after 2009, when his daughter turned 16. He believes his daughter enrolled in college from September 2009 but did not attend and worked in a café instead of studying. He said she moved to her own home in 2011. He understood these changes could stop her mother receiving child benefit and, as child maintenance no longer needs to be paid when a child benefit claim ends, he does not think he should have had to pay any maintenance after 2009.

19. The ICE found Mr A reported this change of circumstance to the CMS by telephone on 4 March 2011. It did not find any evidence of investigations or advice given to address this. HMRC awards and manages child benefit and shares information about entitlement with the CMS so it can make child maintenance decisions.

20. The law says a person needs to make their complaint to an MP within a year of becoming aware of the problem. We cannot investigate complaints made to an MP after one year unless we consider there is a good reason to do so. In this case, we can see Mr A could have begun the process of complaining, or contacted his MP directly, in 2011, and again when the CMS notified him what it expected him to pay in August 2013.

21. We therefore considered whether there was a good reason for him not to do this until 2017. We understand from what Mr A told us he often worked out of the country so was limited in how much he could engage with the CMS and attend hearings, and he explained he would not receive letters on time. However, we also note he remained a UK resident, had a home in the UK and seemed to be aware of the CMS’s plan to take steps to get the money he owed it because he referred to how stressful he was finding this in a letter sent on 17 February 2016.

22. We recognise Mr A contacted his MP in 2017 because he was so worried about the impact of the CMS’s actions that he decided he needed to seek help. We are not persuaded there was a good reason for him not to complain to either the CMS or his MP earlier, as we have seen no barrier to him doing so over this six-year period. Therefore, our time limit prevents us looking at the service the CMS provided in 2015 and before.

Fraud reports in 2017

23. Mr A also complains that neither the CMS nor HMRC investigated whether there had been child benefit fraud in 2017. He contacted the CMS to discuss this in August 2017 and the CMS told him HMRC would need to look at whether there had been any fraud. He made a fraud report to HMRC in September 2017.

24. The CMS does not have the power to investigate child benefit claims, as this is not a benefit it administers. It relies on HMRC to do this, and we can see the CMS gave Mr A appropriate explanations when it told him on 20 October 2017:

‘when a non-resident parent contacts the Agency to say a qualifying child is no longer a child for child maintenance purposes, they will initially carry out checks with HM Revenue and Customs, to confirm the child benefit status. If child benefit is in payment, the Agency will advise the non-resident parent, the qualifying child will still be considered as a child for child maintenance purposes. The non-resident parent will be advised to raise their concerns with HM Revenue and Customs and the telephone number of a dedicated child benefit team is provided.’

25. When Mr A asked HMRC for information about what it had done to look at his concerns, it told him it could not share any information about third parties. After Mr A’s MP pressed it for clarification on how it was moving forward with the concerns, it said it could not investigate these allegations due to the passage of time and its records being deleted.

26. We understand Mr A was deeply frustrated to hear this, and he told us HMRC could still have investigated whether his child benefit should have been stopped sooner than it was. We do not think HMRC would have been able to carry out this kind of investigation, which could have been challenged in court, once its records had been deleted. This is because it would not have been able to see the information it had received, the reasons it had awarded child benefit and whether it should have made different decisions. It may have been able to say what was likely to have happened and whether it was likely there had been fraud, but it would need comprehensive evidence to look at a claim of fraud.

27. Because HMRC did not have records of the claim, Mr A could not get it to reconsider its decision on when he should have stopped paying child maintenance. We do not think either organisation could or should have responded differently to fraud being reported in 2017. The CMS’s and HMRC’s decision-making seems to be reasonable, evidence-based and in line with our Principles of Good Administration, which say ‘public bodies should be open and truthful when accounting for their decisions and actions’.

CMS enforcement action

28. Mr A complained the CMS’s steps to recover the maintenance it said he owed caused a huge amount of unnecessary stress. We can see it began writing to him in 2015 to say it was seeking an order from the court. It then applied for another order in February 2016 to allow it to recover maintenance from the sale of Mr A’s home.

29. We have reviewed the correspondence Mr A shared with us and we have not seen any evidence the CMS or its legal representatives communicated inappropriately or disrespectfully. We understand Mr A may have found the language used threatening, but we can see the CMS gave reasonable and accurate explanations of what he could expect to happen. Our Principles of Good Administration say ‘public bodies should aim to make sure customers are clear about their entitlements, about what they can and cannot expect from the public body and about their own responsibilities’.

30. The CMS’s role, as defined in the Child Support Act 1991, is to assess and, where necessary, enforce the payment of child maintenance. Sections 29 to 41 of the Act give the CMS a range of powers it can use to recover maintenance that is not being paid, from court orders to seeking imprisonment. The more severe enforcement actions mean the CMS has to apply to the court to make sure it is using its powers appropriately.

31. The CMS can only take steps to enforce its decisions where it thinks maintenance is unlikely to be paid. This is set out in section 4(2A)(b) of the Child Support Act 1991. At the time the CMS began taking steps in 2015, Mr A had not made any maintenance payments since the child support tribunal had decided what he owed in August 2013. As Mr A did not make any payments in the following three years either, the CMS was acting in line with its responsibilities under the Act in deciding this met the threshold for enforcement action. This decision appears to be based on the evidence and in line with our Principles of Good Administration, which say organisations should act in line with their statutory powers and duties.

32. When the CMS answered Mr A’s complaints in 2017, it told him it had taken steps to enforce its decision because ‘you have not been compliant when it comes to making payments and this has resulted in a large amount of arrears building up. You have maintained you will not pay the arrears as you feel that you have also been charged maintenance for [his eldest daughter], despite being advised on a number of occasions you have not.’ This appears to be consistent with the evidence and with how the Child Support Act 1991 says the CMS should recover maintenance arrears.

33. We appreciate Mr A still feels the CMS and HMRC gave him poor service and he believes they caused him significant distress and financial loss as a result. Having looked carefully at the matters he raises, we have not seen evidence that the CMS treated Mr A unfairly or that either HMRC or the CMS should have done more to investigate his report of child benefit fraud in 2017. Our time limit prevents us from looking in more detail at the CMS’s actions prior to 2015. For these reasons, we will take no further action regarding Mr A’s complaint.

1. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman has carefully considered Mr A’s complaint about the service he received from the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). We were sorry to hear of the stress he describes and appreciate these issues went on for a long time.

2. We do not think we can look at what happened before 2015. This was more than one year before Mr A contacted his MP and we cannot see there was good reason for him not to begin the complaint process earlier than he did. Our one-year time limit prevents us from looking at his complaint.

3. Mr A also complains he received poor service from the CMS and HMRC in 2017. Having looked at the concerns he had and how both organisations addressed them and having thought about the relevant guidelines and standards, we have not seen any evidence the CMS or HMRC made mistakes or should have acted differently. As a result, we will take no further action. We explain our decision further below.