Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what the value is of duplicate supplier payments identified by his Department since 2010; and what proportion of such payments have since been recovered in each of the last two financial years.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) does not hold all of the required data centrally and could not answer this question in full without incurring disproportionate costs. However, we recently investigated duplicate supplier payments for the eight month period from April to November 2013 and identified just one duplicate invoice, with a value of £2,501. Our financial control system prevented any payment being made. The FCO has several controls in place to prevent duplicate payments.