AROUND £240,000 of tax-payers money has been spent on paying bills twice.

An internal audit report has revealed that Gloucestershire County Council spent the sum in the last year on double payments.

A further £145,000 was identified in the report as having potentially been spent on paying bills twice, although this has not been confirmed. The council said that so far £210,000 has been reclaimed from the companies that were overpaid. The revelations came to light today when members of the county’s Liberal Democrat group revealed the findings of the report, published on June 30.

Cllr Jeremy Hilton, Liberal Democrat leader said: "This is a shocking report. At such a critical time of recession the council is throwing away hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money by paying its bills twice. All of the money lost must be identified and recovered now."

The Liberal Democrats have written to the Audit Commission to ask for an independent inquiry into the figures.

The internal report looked at a period between November 2007 and October 2008 and said that on average the council had spent £32,000 a month on paying bills twice.

However the report investigated only payments made over £500, suggesting there could be many more payments made twice that have not been identified yet.

Cllr Dennis Andrewartha, Liberal Democrat finance spokesman, said: "From the first meeting we have now seen this internal audit report. The scale of the duplicate payments of invoices is huge. The report has only covered one period out of the last four years. "The council must not sit back and wait for internal reports and council bureaucracy to look at this issue. We need an independent investigation into this problem. Any delay will cost taxpayers thousands more in bills being paid twice"

A spokeswoman for Gloucestershire County Council said: "It is important to be clear that this not unusual for any business of our size that spends more than £1,000,000,000 per year. Currently £30,000 is outstanding but certainly has not been lost.

"The council made 662,000 transactions and external experts PSFC (Public Sector Funds Recovery) have confirmed that 99.99 per cent of our transactions were carried out correctly.

"In fact, we are performing well above the national average for companies like ours in this respect."