057f3528_1997_articles__s__not_necessarily_contiguous_
[Date & reference] 1997-11-06 Electronic Telegraph CSA blunders 'would take a year to mend' By Robert Shrimsley, Chief Political Correspondent
THE scale of errors by the Child Support Agency is so great that it would take the entire staff a year to rectify them, its chief executive admitted yesterday. Faith Boardman accepted criticisms that 85 per cent of the payments made by absent parents were inaccurate. A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, the independent financial watchdog of Government spending, said the majority of errors "were caused by mistakes in the underlying maintenance assessments". His report calculated that a sixth of the errors were of more than £1,000. The number of people affected is unclear, although the CSA is handling 610,000 cases and has processed more than two million claims in its four-year history. Yesterday, Mrs Boardman faced the anger of MPs at the Commons Public Accounts Committee and admitted that the agency was facing an almost impossible backlog. So great was the burden that the CSA was not even attempting to go back and clear all the errors. Mrs Boardman said the errors mainly related to the "agency's incompetence when it was first set up" and the CSA was now achieving an 86 per cent accuracy rate in securing the right payments from absent parents. Instead of revisiting immediately all the cases of errors - which involved both over and underpayments by absent parents - the CSA intends to use its system of two-yearly reviews of all existing cases to correct the mistakes. But Mrs Boardman accepted that the problem would cause significant amounts of debt to whichever parent had benefited from the errors. The CSA is still falling behind. More than half of outstanding assessments have waited more than a year for processing.
1997 articles
Extracts (not necessarily contiguous)