The UK tax authority, HMRC, has started using border records to identify people receiving Child Benefit who have moved abroad. The National Audit Office reviewed this scheme on 24 June 2026. Their conclusion: the idea works, but HMRC needs to slow down and get the details right before trying it elsewhere.

Here is how it works. Child Benefit — money the government pays to families with children — only goes to people living in the UK. If someone moves abroad for good, the payments have to stop. HMRC set up a small specialist team in August 2025 to compare travel records from the Home Office (the department that tracks who enters and leaves the country) with the list of people claiming Child Benefit. If the records show someone has left and not come back, HMRC can stop their payments. The department said this could save £350 million.

The National Audit Office's main concern is not the idea — it is about whether HMRC is doing it carefully enough. Sharing information between different government departments is quite new. It needs clear rules about who can see what data, checks to catch mistakes, and written instructions that new staff can follow. Without this foundation, the same errors will happen again if HMRC tries the same approach with other benefits.

Why Child Benefit Matters

Child Benefit is not a small payment. In 2017-18, it cost the government £11.7 billion — a major part of the benefits system. It goes to millions of families, and the checks to see if people still qualify are fairly loose compared to other benefits. That means there is more risk of fraud, but also more risk of honest mistakes.

Finding out where someone actually lives is tricky. When the government checks if someone earns money in the UK, it has tax records to look at. But finding out where someone lives is harder. Different government departments hold clues — the border agency, the driving licence authority, GP surgeries — but HMRC does not see all of this information. Home Office travel records are one of the best clues available. But they are not perfect. Someone could have a long holiday abroad, work abroad for a while, or visit a sick relative — any of which would show up in the travel data without meaning they should lose their Child Benefit.

The Risk of Getting It Wrong

This is where the National Audit Office's warning matters most. When there is a target to save £350 million, there is pressure to act on every match in the data — even ones that might not be correct. HMRC can stop payments quickly, but that does not mean the process is fair. People have a right to a proper hearing before the government takes their money away. If HMRC stops payments wrongly, it has to put them back and deal with complaints and court cases. This also makes it harder to understand what real fraud looks like — because payments that were wrongly stopped and then restored muddy the statistics.

HMRC has had problems before. When it dealt with Tax Credits — a different benefit — it took years to spot that people were being overpaid, and even longer to get the money back. So the National Audit Office is saying: think carefully before you expand this scheme.

If HMRC gets this right — if it writes down exactly how the system works and keeps records of mistakes so it can learn from them — then it could use the same approach for other benefits. That would be useful, because the government wants to cut fraud and errors without hiring more people. But first, HMRC needs to prove it has got the basics right.