Procurement card spending

You asked

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:

1. How many procurement cards are issued in your department?

2. Have you had an internal audit of procurement card spending in the last three years? If so can you provide the report(s)?

3. If any procurement card holder has been reprimanded for its usage or had a transaction queried for validity could you please provide the redacted details?

4. Could you provide the name of the bank(s) who provide your departmental procurement cards.

5. Could you please provide the following spending details on all departmental Government Procurement Cards and any other credit cards or equivalent that are paid for out of public funds in .csv format:

• Posted date and occurred date if available
• Billing amount (please let state how you express returns e.g. as a negative number, as a number in brackets or other variations)
• Merchant name (as expressed in the bank statements if available)
• Category of spending type if available (plus details of the classification system and the banking classification system if also available e.g Merchant Category
• Code
• Justification (if given)

I request the above data for the last 3 fiscal years (2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16). If this is not deliverable in a single request could you provide details for the last two fiscal years and summary total for fiscal year 2013/14 (with category breakdown if available). If you cannot provide all of the above within the scope mentioned above, please provide what available information you have and an explanation for why you cannot provide the data broken down into that field.

We said

1. GPC cards issued - 73
2. Internal Audits are undertaken twice a year. Two examples are attached, with any personal information removed. Expenses are assessed quarterly by random sample. The samples are not based on amounts, or types of transaction, they are completely random. Those highlighted in yellow were queried, but not because they looked suspicious or the amount was curious.
3. No card holder has been reprimanded. Some have been queried as per the Audit (highlighted in Yellow within the spreadsheet)
4. Barclaycard are our GPC provider.
5. All GPC transactions are published on our website for ease of transparency. The next edition will be published in June 2016 https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/organisationdeclarations/governmentprocurementcardgpcexpenditure