Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to tackle miscalculations of child maintenance liabilities by paying parents who are (a) self-employed or (b)company directors.

The Child Maintenance Service’s definition of income includes almost all sources of gross income reported to HMRC by company directors or self-employed parents. The specially trained Financial Investigation Unit (FIU) are able to look into cases where there is concern about a parent’s income. The FIU has been expanded since it was set up in 2014; and between July and September 2017 it opened 1100 complex earner investigations. We recently launched a consultation on our new Child Maintenance Compliance and Arrears strategy which proposes further improvements to the treatment of the income of complex earners, such as high value assets owned by a parent being used to create a notional income.