Search for duplicate payment statistics and you will find claims that between one and two percent of accounts payable disbursements go out twice. Some sources put it higher. The figures are usually attributed to a research body, and they appear on the websites of companies that sell recovery services.
We went looking for the primary sources behind those numbers. In most cases they do not exist. The same figure is attributed to two different organizations on different pages, neither of which published it, which is the signature of a statistic that has been passed around long enough that its origin has been lost.
The verifiable picture is different from the marketed one, and more useful.
What a real audit found
The State of Texas commissioned an overpayment recovery audit covering 54.1 billion dollars in vendor payments across fifty-one state agencies, made between September 2015 and June 2019. The results were reported to the state legislature in January 2021.
The audit firm went in expecting a payment failure rate of about one tenth of one percent of overall spend. It found an average failure rate of five hundredths of one percent. Across 54.1 billion dollars, it identified 477 duplicate payments totaling 3,590,685.86 dollars.
That is a smaller loss rate than the vendor literature suggests. It is not a reason to relax, and the reason why is in what happened next.
Finding the money is not the hard part
Of roughly 4.1 million dollars in gross overpayment claims identified by that audit, the agencies disputed 2.9 million dollars. As of the report to the legislature, 14,560.88 dollars had actually been recovered.
Read that again. Four point one million identified. Fourteen and a half thousand recovered.
The agencies disagreed with 212 of the 477 duplicate payments, covering nearly 2.5 million dollars. Some of those disputes were surely correct. What the number establishes is that identification and recovery are two entirely different problems, and the second one is much harder.
This is the pattern we see in commercial work as well. An audit produces a report. The report is circulated. Vendors are contacted, some of them push back, the person chasing it has a day job, and eighteen months later the findings are still findings. Every one of them needed an owner, a status, and a close date on the day it was identified.
Why duplicates happen: the vendor master
The Texas audit surfaced one root cause worth naming specifically. Of the duplicate payments identified, 760,580.71 dollars had been paid to different vendor numbers for the same company.
That is not a control failure in accounts payable. The controls worked. They compared invoice numbers within a vendor record, and these invoices were in different vendor records. The same supplier existed in the system three or four times, under a legal name, a trade name, an acquired name, and a misspelling, and no duplicate check could see across them.
This is why vendor master reconciliation is the first step in any serious effort here, and why it also unlocks the larger prize. The same reconciliation that catches a duplicate payment reveals that your negotiated volume is spread across four vendor records and that you never hit the discount threshold you paid to negotiate.
There is a bigger number and it is not in the duplicates
The audit also revealed something about detection lag. Some fiscal 2016 accounts payable records had already been purged under state retention policy before the audit could examine them. The audit was looking back three to four years, and part of the trail was already gone.
That points at the more expensive problem, which is not the duplicate payment itself but the state of the process that produced it.
Ardent Partners surveys accounts payable and finance leaders annually. In its 2025 study of 212 leaders, more than half at companies above a billion dollars in revenue, invoice exceptions ranked as the number one challenge in accounts payable for the first time in nineteen years of running the research. Fifty-three percent named it.
The supporting numbers explain why. The average invoice exception rate is fourteen percent. Best-in-class organizations run nine percent; everyone else runs twenty-two percent. Only 32.6 percent of invoices are processed straight through without human intervention. The average organization takes 9.2 days to process a single invoice, against 3.1 days for best-in-class and 17.4 days for everyone else.
And the cost: 9.40 dollars to process one invoice on average. Best-in-class spend 2.78 dollars. All others spend 12.88 dollars, a gap of roughly eighty percent.
A company processing a hundred thousand invoices a year at the “all others” rate is spending 1.29 million dollars on invoice processing. Moving to best-in-class economics is worth more than the duplicate payments will ever be, and it is a durable saving rather than a one-time recovery.
On recovery audit firms
Recovery audit firms typically take twenty to forty percent of recovered funds as their fee, according to the Texas Legislative Budget Board analysis. Texas itself negotiated rates between 13.5 and 22.5 percent across three contract cycles.
There is nothing wrong with that model. It is worth understanding what it does and does not do. A contingency recovery audit looks backward and is paid on what it claws back. It does not change the process that produced the error, which means you will need it again in three years.
The more durable work is preventive: reconcile the vendor master, connect contracts to invoices to ledger entries, and reduce the exception rate that generates the manual handling where errors are introduced.
How we approach it
EvoXedge, our spend and contract intelligence platform, reads invoices, contracts, and general ledger data together. Duplicate payment risk is one of seven detectors it runs, alongside off-contract spending, invoicing above contracted rates, expired-contract invoicing, near-threshold volume commitments, ledger entries without invoices, and unmatched line items.
Every finding then moves through a pipeline to recovered: acknowledged, assigned, in progress, resolved. Given what the Texas numbers show about the distance between identified and recovered, that pipeline is not a feature. It is the entire point.
Related reading
The vendor master problem described above is the same one that drives tail spend management. For what happens between the contract and the invoice, see contract value leakage.
Working with us
EvoXvantage delivers cost and process transformation for organizations that want results measured in weeks rather than quarters. Our leadership brings more than twenty years of execution experience, and senior attention stays on the engagement from start to finish.
If you cannot say today how many duplicate payments you made last year, that is worth a conversation. We begin with a discovery call at no cost.
Book a 30-minute strategy call: calendly.com/bomsi-billimoria-evoxvantage
Sources
Audit scope, failure rate, duplicate payment totals, vendor master findings, and amounts disputed and recovered: Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, State of Texas Overpayment Recovery Audit, Report to the 87th Legislature, January 2021.
Recovery audit fee ranges: Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, citing the Legislative Budget Board, December 2010.
Invoice exception rates, straight-through processing, cycle time, and cost per invoice: Ardent Partners, Accounts Payable Metrics that Matter in 2025, 212 respondents.
