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National Audit Office questions data reliability and claims accounts contain over £50m in erroneous payments
The government's official spending watchdog has rejected the accounts of the body set up to replace the Child Support Agency after discovering millions of pounds of wrongly made payments and questioning a £3.69bn backlog in uncollected debts.
The Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC) estimates that less than £500m of the uncollected payments will ever be recovered, leaving thousands of lone parents in limbo.
The National Audit Office refused to sign off the accounts, saying they contained £53.4m worth of erroneous payments over the past two years. They also questioned the reliability of the data revealing the £3.69bn mountain in arrears and the estimate for the recoverable proportion.
Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, said the commission was facing significant challenges in resolving the historic problems left by the disastrous Child Support Agency, which it is gradually replacing.
"Accuracy of maintenance assessments continues to be a challenge. The commission is continuing to improve the accounting information available, so that the historic problems affecting the accuracy of arrears data are more visible," he said. "However, the commission still has a significant challenge in collecting the arrears, which have accumulated since the beginning of the maintenance schemes."
The two accounts published reveal that £13.5m was overpaid and £15.5m underpaid in 2008-9; for 2009-10 £10m was overpaid and £14.4m underpaid. The commission reported £3.71bn in uncollected arrears at 31 March 2009 and £3.69bn at 31 March 2010.
"These figures do not give a true and fair view because of the level of error in the underlying case data," the NAO said.
Maria Miller, the minister responsible for the system, said the NAO's judgment was proof that the system was broken, justifying the major reforms aimed to encourage parents to resolve their problems themselves, partly by charging them to use maintenance recovery services.
A spokeswoman for Gingerbread, the charity for lone parents, said: "Billions of pounds owed to single parents will most likely never be collected. That raises issues about whether people should be compensation for the CSA's poor performance. The question now is whether the government is just going to walk away from the thousands of people owed money."
She also said that it raised questions about government plans to charge to resolve child maintenance disputes, given that the service had such a poor record.
Miller welcomed the "honest approach" to establishing the scale of the arrears. "These provide a clear baseline on arrears after a decade of the previous government sidestepping the issue," she said. "The current system … is broken. In publishing our green paper we have laid out a vision for a more efficient system."
