Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 21
21
Accepted
As of 1 March 2022, DHSC was owed £74 million from people who had not...
Recommendation
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
Government Response Summary
The government agrees with the recommendation and states that the UK Health Security Agency has already provided the Committee with a quarterly update on chargeback and hardship recoveries, with the next letter to be sent by the end of September including responses to the specific points raised.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
6: PAC conclusion: DHSC failed to adequately protect the taxpayer from fraud in the Managed Quarantine Service (MQS), and is not pursuing the fraud that it has identified vigorously enough. 6: PAC recommendation: DHSC should write to the Committee as part of its Treasury Minute response setting out: • how much of the fraud and unpaid MQS bills it has recovered, how much it has written off, and how it plans to recover the outstanding amount; • how much of the outstanding amount is due to fraud, unpaid hardship plans and other reasons; • how much of the debts arising from the hardship plan are owed by people who self-certified hardship; • how much it has spent collecting unpaid MQS bills; and • how many fraud cases it has identified, investigated and successfully prosecuted. 6.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented 6.2 The UK Health Security Agency has already provided the Committee with a quarterly update on chargeback and hardship recoveries. The next letter will be sent to the Committee by the end of September whch will include responses to the recommendations above.