A technology company with over $5 billion in annual spend and 16,000 vendors had to identify potential over-payments made to vendors. They also wanted to identify potential risks in their accounts payable process. The company’s internal audit team had already red-flagged some vendors, which raised concerns with executive management. Along with identifying over-payments, the client also wanted to automate the identification of risk areas and unusual activity going forward.
Approach
Approach
Selective Findings
Outcome & Deliverables
- A large number of inactive vendors in the vendor master who were not been paid in the last 24 months.
- Multiple vendors receiving payments without Tax-Id populated in Vendor Master.
- Quantity variances identified between PO / Invoice and Delivery documents.
- Price variances between different vendors supplying the same product to the company.
- Large price variances of the same products sold by the same vendor to different teams within the company.
- Duplicate invoices paid due to a process error in the firm’s duplicate invoice identification methodology.
- Vendors charging more and being paid than the contracted amount.
- Vendors not complying with contract terms by not awarding bulk discounts or paying rebates for bulk purchases.
- Vendors not meeting contracted SLA terms.
Outcome & Deliverables
- Risk assessment of vendor payment processes.
- Recovery of over $5M from vendor overpayments.
- Vendor and payment risk profile dashboard for management.
- Recommendations for mitigating identified risks.
- Development of training material for employees to prevent and detect future losses through overpayment.