Duplicate payments made to MPs in error

Request

In the years of 2010,2011,2012 & 2013 what was the total sum of duplicate payments made to MP's in error, please name the members who received the payments in totals and how much has been recovered from them

Further to the above how many mp's are currently being asked to repay monies claimed, who are they and is the full payment expected to be recovered?

Response

In order to locate this information, we would need to download all transactions ever processed for every MP, by year, and manually search for those which may be duplicates (ie. transactions which were made on the same day for the same amount). We would then need to investigate the transactions identified as possible duplicates to determine whether or not they were legitimate claims or duplicates made in error. According to our estimations, it is possible that to do this for one MP for one calendar year alone would take a number of hours.

In processing your request, we undertook a test to estimate the amount of time it would take to locate, retrieve and extract this information from all the records we hold for each individual MP since 2010. We estimate that it would take over 5,800 hours of staff time to do so, via the process described above.

As you will be aware, this would take us considerably over the appropriate cost limit of £450 (part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Freedom of Information Act). Consequently, IPSA is not obliged to respond to your request (see section 12(1), FOIA).

Ref:
F1415-020
Disclosure:
1 June 2014
Categories:
GENERAL EXPENSES ENQUIRYIPSA - OPERATIONS
Exemptions Applied:
Cost limit