MoD acquired £211bn value of suspicious invoices in three years

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has rejected greater than £211bn value of suspicious invoices prior to now three years as a part of a broader effort to tighten monetary oversight and scale back the chance of fraud.

Based on knowledge obtained by way of a Freedom of Info (FOI) request and analysed by the Parliament Road suppose tank, the MoD blocked 8,918 invoices totalling £211.6bn between 2022 and 2025.

Simply over half — 5,063 — had been later corrected and resubmitted efficiently by suppliers. The remaining 3,855 had been completely rejected.

Causes cited for the rejections included invalid tax data, incorrect pricing, lacking provider particulars, duplicate bill numbers, and use of inactive buy orders.

The figures come within the wake of two high-profile fraud instances involving former MoD personnel.

In April 2025, ex-corporal Aaron Stelmach-Purdie was sentenced to jail for defrauding the MoD of £911,677 by means of fraudulent expense claims submitted by way of an inside on-line platform. The court docket heard that he retained over £550,000 for private use.

In a separate case in June, military monetary administrator Andrew Oakes was discovered to have stolen greater than £300,000 by issuing cheques to himself whereas falsifying stubs to make them seem as funds to reliable distributors.

The funds had been used to buy a number of autos, together with three Teslas and a Mini Cooper.

Commenting on the findings, Jason Kurtz, CEO of invoicing platform Basware, mentioned:

“These figures expose the large volumes of bill fraud and errors dealing with authorities departments each day. When fraud is suspected, we’ll usually see main fluctuations in billing figures, particularly if the legal thinks they’ll cheat the system utilizing stolen knowledge reminiscent of cloned e-mail addresses and financial institution particulars.”

Kurtz added that the burden on finance groups is just not solely in detecting fraud but in addition in managing the executive fallout:

“The large workload related to investigating and rejecting incomplete or faux invoices is a big drain on assets. That’s why it’s important that AI-based verification is deployed, to make sure all invoices are correct earlier than they enter the funds system.”

Dr Janet Bastiman, chief knowledge scientist at Napier AI, mentioned the general public sector stays a main goal for legal teams because of the quantity of transactions and breadth of provider relationships concerned.

“Bill fraud is a key tactic utilized by criminals to divert reliable funds into rogue financial institution accounts,” she mentioned. “Massive authorities organisations tasked with managing 1000’s of transactions daily from a number of suppliers are a prime goal for malicious events in search of to extract funds utilizing faux paperwork to gasoline cash laundering, organised crime, and illicit actions.

“Key to neutralising these threats is to deploy AI-powered monetary crime detection instruments to trace and establish anomalies that may very well be suspicious transactions, permitting public sector resolution makers to identify criminality and take quick motion.”

The MoD has not publicly commented on the FOI figures, however the quantity of rejected invoices underscores the size of the executive problem dealing with public sector finance groups amid rising scrutiny over fraud controls and public spending self-discipline.