5 steps NHS finance teams can take to prevent duplicate payments
Preventing duplicate payments isn’t only about compliance, it’s about protecting NHS resources and improving resilience.
With increasing financial pressure and transaction volumes, many Trusts are finding that manual checks and NFI returns alone aren’t enough. The latest National Audit Office report encourages public bodies to strengthen analytics, improve controls, and optimise how fraud and error risks are managed. Here are five practical steps to start making that shift.
5 steps to prevent duplicate payments
1. Clean up your supplier master data
Inaccurate or duplicate supplier records are a common source of errors. Ensure records are consistently maintained, periodically reviewed, and aligned with procurement systems to avoid duplicate entries and payment confusion.
2. Reconcile supplier statements regularly
Supplier statement reconciliation can uncover missed credits, overpayments, and duplicates. NHS Trusts can use automation tools to reduce reconciliation tasks from hours to minutes. They can build this into standard Accounts Payable practice, especially with high-spend or high-volume suppliers.
3. Use analytics to identify risk patterns
Go beyond basic matching logic with the latest tools which use sophisticated “fuzzy matching” algorithms and AI to identify usual payment patterns, value anomalies, or payment timings. These will indicate high-risk transactions early, before money leaves the organisation.
4. Optimise fraud and error rules over time
Review and refine detection algorithms or control thresholds regularly. What worked last year may no longer be effective, especially as suppliers and processes change.
5. Assign clear ownership for reviewing flagged payments
Many NHS Trusts lack the capacity to investigate flagged risks. Make sure there is accountability for reviewing analytics outputs, or partner with a provider who can support with specialist experts and the latest tools.
Ready to go further?
Liberata helps NHS Trusts prevent future errors while recovering past ones. Our Duplicate Payments Recovery Service has recovered over £870,000 for the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, combining advanced analytics with actionable insights without requiring your team’s resources.
