EAST Lothian Council paid out thousands of pounds for the care of a dead resident and paid contractors twice for the same work in errors which cost more than £52,000.

The mistakes were discovered during a national fraud initiative when public records held by the council were compared to records from other organisations to look for any “irregular” matches. It also uncovered more than 100 people who had blue badges or parking permits by “error”.

The investigation, which was carried out over the last year, found more than 3,152 matches on its computer system and advised the local authority to investigate 578 of them.

A report to the council’s audit and governance committee, which met at Haddington Town House last Tuesday, revealed that 494 of the cases have been investigated to date.

Out of those, 114 had so far been upheld as having some fraud or errors involved.

The report said 109 of them involved blue badges or residents’ parking permits and “in each case appropriate action was taken by the council. . . to either cancel the permit/badge or update the system with the correct information”.

Of the remaining five cases, £5,513 was paid to a residential care home after the resident it related to had died, while £35,023 was paid to a contractor through two duplicate payments.

A further £11,808 payment was made to two separate contractors for the same job.

In the case of the care home, it was reported that the money had since been recovered by the local authority.

However, recovery of the payments to the contractors remain ongoing.

The report by Audit Scotland said that despite the incidents found during the fraud investigation, it believed the council had appropriate arrangements in place for the prevention and detection of bribery and corruption.