Barnet Council has moved to reassure people it is not paying twice for the same services after the issue was flagged as a potential accounting risk.

The council’s Audit Committee was quizzed by members of the public on the topic of duplicate payments, which can be a major drain on an organisation’s finances, at a meeting on April 19.

It said there was no indication from testing carried out last year that data was being entered incorrectly on its systems – but added that is impossible to remove human error from the process entirely.

The audit committee report identifies duplicate payments as a ‘high-risk’ issue.

Duplicate payments can be the result of fraud or human error – and with the council paying contractors such as Capita for its services, residents raised concerns they could have been overcharged.

The Audis Committee report states: “Because these controls rely on data being entered correctly, they have historically not been very successful at automatically detecting duplicates, and although there are other secondary controls management do not consider them of sufficient robustness to prevent the processing of duplicate invoices.”

At present, the council uploads data from possible duplicate payments via a web portal and the Cabinet Office sends matches back that relate to possible duplications.

But the Audit Committee report said the high number of matches received made it ‘uneconomical’ for the council’s anti-fraud team to investigate them.

The council is to look at bringing in new software in a bid to identify, report and prevent duplicate payments.

It said the extra safeguarding measures should be in place by the end of July.