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Managing Corporate Risks and Preserving Assets - Tell me something I did not know?
Imagine, you are incredibly wealthy individual and you don’t want to be bothered paying your own bills. As such, you outsource the payment of your bills to a bill payment provider.
You think everything is great; the bill payment provider is a large company which is Sarbanes Oxley Compliant. On a regular basis the bill payment provider provides you with an excel spreadsheet of what invoices are to be paid along with a link to the bills. You assume the bills scheduled to be paid are correct.
The bill payment provider advises you to allow them to debit your account for $100,200.00 for the bills they are about to pay on your behalf. No questions asked you give authorization to the bill payment provider to debit your account for the amount due.
Out of curiosity, you click on a few bills to see what you are paying. You were shocked by the amount of the invoice from your yacht vendor. You call the vendor and asked. “Can you tell me why the maintenance and a few repairs on my yacht are so high?” The vendor advises you, I cannot give you this information I can only speak to your bill payment provider. You ask the vendor, “Why do I have to speak to my bill payment provider if the money is coming out of my account and I am paying you? Your vendor responds “Sorry you do not have power of attorney to talk to us, only your bill payment provider does. “Please have them call us if you believe there is a discrepancy.” You attempt on several occasions to contact the bill payment provider but there is no response. You say to yourself, how absurd is this? I can’t even check with the vendor to see what is being paid and my bill payment provider is ignoring me.
You toss and you turn all night and ask yourself: “How do I know the bill payment provider is paying the vendor what is due and not something else?”
You ask yourself, maybe the maintenance on my yacht was $3,500 and my bill payment provider paid $7,000. How do I know? Was the template of the actual invoice keyed in improperly by the bill payment provider? What reconciliation do I have? Do I have any reconciliation at all? Can I get copies of the canceled checks? The answer to this problem may shock you; however, it happens every day in corporate America and it is costing companies tens of millions of dollars a year per year in lost revenues and is going undetected for the past twenty years. Depending on whom your bill payment provider is there may be no canceled checks or any reconciliation of your company’s bank account as the funds are co-mingled with other clients.
The moral of the story: Any individual or any company which outsources the payment of utility bills needs to audit these bills on an annual basis with a company which has the algorithms in place to identify and quantify these types of over payments.
In summary, perhaps you did not know this? However, this is just one small step in managing risks and preserving assets.
Posted: 3/9/2023 12:00:00 PM by
Global Administrator | with 0 comments
Filed under: corporate risk