Caroline Lucas – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Caroline Lucas on 2016-03-21.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the criteria are for referral of a child maintenance case to the Child Maintenance Group’s Financial Investigations Unit.

Priti Patel

The current referral criteria requires the non-resident parent to have agreed the income figure provided by HMRC and for this to have then been challenged by the parent with care.

However, it has been recognised that this criteria does not identify all potential triggers for referral and does not take into account those non-resident parents that do not respond to Child Maintenance Group (CMG) contact. Non-resident parents are told in their calculation letters to contact CMG if anything used in the calculation is wrong. CMG intend therefore, to use this instruction as a gateway to investigate cases where the HMRC information is challenged. The criteria for these challenges are currently being formulated, to ensure the Financial Investigations Unit act proportionately and will be delivered to all CMG caseworkers as soon as it is agreed.