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The MoD admitted that it had uncovered another pension blunder while trying to reimburse disabled service pensioners who paid tax they should never have been charged.

The Telegraph revealed in January that thousands of disabled servicemen and women were owed millions of pounds in unjustified tax.

An investigation has now found that in some cases, pensioners who paid tax were not even receiving the full pension they were due.

The ministry, which had previously claimed that the cost of putting the original error right would not reach £6 million, admitted that the total was now likely to be about £30 million.

Those affected by the latest blunder were each owed up to £30,000 in unpaid pension, officials said. It resulted from attempts to clear a backlog of 15,000 cases in the 1990s. So far, 350 people are known to be affected.

More than 1,000 people had been found to be affected by the original error so far, but it will take another year before all the files on current pensions could be checked.

Officials admitted that they were not looking at cases in which pensioners had died, unless the families contacted them directly.

The problem was uncovered by a retired Royal Artillery officer, Major John Perry, who spent several years trying to get MoD bureaucrats to accept first that he was owed money, and then that many others were also affected.

In a letter to Maj Perry, Jonathan Iremonger, the MoD's director of service personnel policy pensions and veterans, said it was now looking into compensation.

Maj Perry said the latest blunder would only delay the process of repaying those affected. "By confessing that they are in one hell of a bloody mess they will let a lot more pensioners and widows die before it is sorted out."

He also warned that many elderly widows whose husbands had been wrongly charged tax would miss out, as few widows of disabled servicemen inherit their pension when their husband dies.

He appealed to anyone who knew of someone in this instance to help them get in touch with the MoD.

"It simply isn't enough to check the cases where pensions are still being paid. The widows who do not receive a pension are still owed money that was wrongly taken from their husbands."