Support agency successor slammed over errors

Amyas Morse, the head of the National Audit Office (NAO), highlighted inaccuracies in maintenance assessments and uncertainty about billions of pounds of outstanding arrears.

In a report on the client funds accounts of the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission (CMEC) for 2008/9 and 2009/10, he said the body had made improvements since it took over from the Child Support Agency.

However, increased transparency in the accounts had laid bare the scale of the problem the commission had inherited, he added.

Mr Morse qualified the accounts in terms of regularity because maintenance had been overpaid and underpaid to the tune of millions of pounds in each year.

In 2008/9, there are thought to have been £13.5m in overpayments and £15.5m in underpayments. In 2009/10, there were £10m in overpayments and £14.4m in underpayments.

The Auditor General gave a further “adverse opinion” on the outstanding arrears in the CMEC accounts.

These were supposed to have been £3.717bn in March 2009 and £3.694bn in March 2010, but the NAO did not feel that the figures gave a “true and fair view” of the situation because of the level of error.

It is believed that the March 2009 figure could contain £208m of overstatements and £288m of understatements.

In March 2010, the arrears are thought to contain overstatements of £204m and understatements of £305m.

Mr Morse said: “The Commission still has a significant challenge in collecting the arrears, which have accumulated since the beginning of the maintenance schemes.”