Recommendation 21

As of 1 March 2022, DHSC was owed £74 million from people who had not paid for their stay in the MQS or had not paid for their PCR tests. DHSC told us that it had allowed people using the MQS to pay their bill by credit card to make it easy for people to pay, in line with usual practice for hotel accommodation. Some customers have requested refunds from DHSC using the credit card chargeback regime. The NAO found that DHSC had not protected the taxpayer from fraud, including from chargebacks. Its contractor was not contractually obliged to dispute chargebacks (refunds) even when it had ground to do so. By 20 January 2022, DHSC had identified that nearly £18 million of MQS refunds issued were fraudulent.37 DHSC said that at 1 March 2022 it had received £21 million in chargeback requests but was not able to estimate how much of this was fraudulent, or how much was from people who were not satisfied with the service they had paid for. It told us that it had also found fraudulent websites offering people apparent reductions on the MQS. We asked DHSC what steps it was taking to challenge the requests for chargebacks. It told us that since June 2021 it had challenged all requests for chargebacks, and that it tried to prevent fraud by introducing basic checks that the credit card being used was under the same name as the person using the service.38