Corporate Travel Management has been cleared of systemic overcharging in its Australian Government travel arrangements, with an independent audit finding no major concerns despite the company facing a major overcharging scandal in the UK.
The Department of Finance released the findings of an independent review today, concluding there was no evidence of widespread or systemic overcharging by CTM under its Whole of Australian Government Travel Management Services arrangement.
The audit comes as CTM continues to deal with the fallout from accounting discrepancies in its UK operations, where the company was found to have potentially overcharged customers by about $222 million across the 2023-24 and 2024-25 financial years.
The Australian Government commissioned the review in January after CTM’s UK disclosures raised questions about whether similar issues could exist under its Australian arrangements.
CTM is the sole provider of travel management services under the government arrangement, which covers more than 150 government entities.
Between 1 July 2025 and 31 March 2026, government spending on air travel, accommodation and car hire through the arrangement totalled $639 million, including GST, across approximately 783,000 bookings.
Airfares accounted for $453 million of the spend, while accommodation represented $165 million.
The audit, conducted by Axiom Associates, assessed CTM’s management of accommodation, group and airfare bookings, including service fees, refunds, booking changes and travel credits, with a particular focus on the 2024-25 financial year.
It gave the arrangement an overall rating of “Satisfactory Controls”, while all three testing streams returned a “No Major Concern” result.
Key difference between UK and Australian accounts
The review found a key difference between CTM’s Australian and UK operating models that provides greater visibility over transactions in Australia.
Under the Australian arrangement, travel costs are charged directly to individual credit cards. In the UK, expenses are consolidated and invoiced to entities monthly – a model the audit suggested may have contributed to the overcharging issues going undetected.
Accommodation was identified as an area of heightened financial risk because the Accommodation Chargeback scheme can limit travellers’ visibility of underlying supplier invoices. However, testing found no systemic issues.
Group bookings, which involve more manual processes because of negotiations and frequent changes, also showed no material overcharging, although the audit identified “opportunities … to strengthen processes relating to key decisions, approvals and reconciliations.”
Airfare testing, based on a large sample of domestic, single-route fares, similarly found no indicators of overcharging.
The audit cautioned that its conclusions relied primarily on information and evidence supplied by CTM, supplemented by data from airlines, credit card providers and accommodation suppliers.
It said improved access to third-party datasets would support greater independent oversight of CTM’s charging practices in future.
Separate formal investigations into CTM’s Australian operations remain ongoing. CTM has previously said no issues have been identified in relation to the Australian Government Travel Arrangements.
A Department of Finance spokesperson said the audit provided assurance over the integrity of the government travel arrangement following the concerns raised by CTM’s UK disclosures.
