Demands to pay back thousands of pounds in child benefit, claims of emigration after a serious case of sepsis and a complaints unit that is indifferent to the emotional impact of its errors.
Here parents tell of their experiences of being caught up in the HMRC anti-fraud debacle.
Tetiana, 30, London
Tetiana fled the war in Ukraine in 2022 with some of her family including her brother, Roman, who is paraplegic, for whom she is now a full-time carer, and baby who was born in 2021.
In October, she was shocked to receive a letter telling her she could be liable to pay back £3,706.35 in child benefit because she had “moved to Ukraine permanently”.
“I didn’t understand why. When we called HMRC they said: ‘We have information that you left the country in 2020, which is why we stopped paying you.’ I said to him: ‘But I wasn’t even pregnant in 2020.’ There was a pause, then he just said: ‘Oh.’”
“How did they get the information that I had left the country for more than eight weeks? After all, I am officially the carer for Roman, which is also recorded in the system. I have to declare if I leave the country because my brother is disabled.”
It turned out HMRC had sent its letter on the back of incorrect Home Office data, which showed Tetiana had flown out of the UK in 2020 but did not, apparently, return. This was, in fact, the return leg to Ukraine after a short work training trip.
HMRC has admitted the mistake after “mandatory reconsideration” but Tetiana said: “I was scared I wouldn’t be able to provide the evidence they wanted. We have suffered so much stress already because of this war.”
Sharna Vincent, north-east England
Vincent was told her child benefit was being stopped even though she no longer claims it. She also did not take the flight that flagged her as having emigrated because of a serious illness that led to her being in hospital for eight weeks.
Vincent and her family had booked to go to Portugal in October 2023 but couldn’t make the trip because of the illness. On 15 October 2025, she received a letter saying HMRC had information she had left the country and was stopping her child benefit.
Not only had she not taken the flight but “had also cancelled child benefit in August as the child was no longer eligible”.
The letter was distressing: “It said: ‘We could look at reclaiming some of the child benefit paid.’
“I don’t want them to back claim all the money because I can’t afford it.”
She described the demands for proof for her phantom holiday as completely absurd. “It’s like saying I’m the tooth fairy and I have to prove that I’m not.”
“They’ve [HMRC] just set themselves this ridiculous goal (saving £350m) and they are not even thinking about the impact, which is just ridiculous. Now you’ve got all these families who have had their child benefit stopped. It’s so wrong.
“I was in hospital for eight weeks and in intensive care for a day.
“I called up the helpline, explained it all, explained that I’d worked for the same company for 30 years; they weren’t interested.”
Jess Paine, Isle of Wight
In September a letter from HMRC landed on the mat telling Paine her child benefit had been stopped as the tax authority “have information” that she had “left the UK” in March 2024. They gave her one month to prove otherwise.
Paine said she was shocked by the “bizarre” letter as she had not actually travelled when they said she did.
“I was due to go to Mexico … but I hadn’t checked in. The work trip was postponed.
“I tried to get in touch with the Home Office but, my goodness, you literally cannot speak to a person at the Home Office as it turns out,” said Paine, a university lecturer.
She said she “very begrudgingly” responded with the mountain of records HMRC required, including print-outs of all her bank statements and medical records.
She is one of several people who told the Guardian they felt it was wrong and a breach of privacy to require sensitive medical records be sent to strangers at HMRC.
“I don’t feel very happy about having had to send that,” she said.
She also questions how HMRC has information on a flight she did not take but does not apparently have records that show she was in and out of the country three times this year.
When she rang HMRC to ask this she was told: “Oh, we don’t have that information.”
Sarah Butler, Oxfordshire
Sarah had just given birth to her third child when she received a demand from HMRC telling her she must pay back £2,686.40 for a year of child benefit that had been paid.
She was hit with the letter earlier this year, on the back of the pilot HMRC scheme, raising questions about how the national rollout got a green flag if innocent parents were getting caught up in a stressful process of proving a false negative.
“I had a three-month-old baby when I received the letter falsely claiming that I owed them more than £2,000 because they wrongly believe I had not returned from Ireland to visit a friend in 2023.
“Initially, I thought it was a scam.
“I had just days to gather a mountain of documentation, which was hugely stressful especially in the vulnerable postpartum period.
“I remember one day I was just in tears on the way to pick my other children up and thinking, what on earth is going on?”
She had to provide 15 months of bank statements, her accounts, her husband’s accounts and put all of this highly sensitive personal data in an envelope to HMRC, she said.
Worried that it may not have arrived she continually rang HMRC but kept getting “passed between debt collection and child benefit”.
A year on, and seeing that thousands of other parents are now facing similar nightmares, she said: “The system is just so broken.”
In a response to her protests, she was told by a “complaints investigation manager” HMRC had “correctly followed our process”, that it had “listened” to her calls to the helpline and the “advisers correctly explained” its processes and while “this matter has caused a great deal of worry and upset … we did not make a mistake”.
“Ultimately, it feels as though I have paid the cost of the HM Passport Office mistake. No government team has at any point admitted that the fault was not with me, but on their side, and apologised.”
If you have been impacted and want to share your story, please email: lisa.ocarroll@theguardian.com
