CSA makes errors in demanding money totalling £25 million

The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission has not had their accounts for the past two years signed because of the level of errors in maintenance assessments.

Amyas Morse, Comptroller and Auditor General, refused to sign-off the accounts because of the number of errors that were present in them. In 2009-10 the agency demanded £10m too much from absent fathers, to be paid to the mothers, and £14.4m too little from others. The watchdog has also highlighted concerns about the “truth and fairness” and the level of arrears that has been ran up by the Child Support Agency because of the “level of error” in its data.

The CMEC claims that £3.964 billion is still owed by absent parents. The spending watchdog disputes that however and thinks that is including overstatements of £204m and understatements of £305m.

However, it also showed that more problems had come to light because of the new regime and concluded that most of the problems were caused by the CSA.

Because of the amount of inaccuracies it is hard to try to work out how much money can actually be claimed. CMEC estimates than only £482m of the amount it is owed by absent parents can now be collected – 13 per cent of the total.

Mr Mose, the head of the National Audit office, blamed the mistake on long standing computer problems. But added

“The Commission is continuing to improve the accounting information available, so that the historic problems affecting the accuracy of arrears data are more visible.”