Accounts Payable Audits

Duplicate payments, price variances, and overpaid state taxes.  These are just a few of the problems that plague accounts payable (A/P) departments, which in turn costs organizations valuable time and money.  Some estimates measure the cost of duplicate payments alone at 1% or more of a company's annual spend.  That is not difficult to understand when you consider that employees routinely focus efforts on their company's present and upcoming needs.  As such, very little time or attention is spent reviewing paid invoices and purchase contracts for closed fiscal years to determine whether monies were overpaid.

If these issues have a familiar ring, Morey & Company can help.  We utilize state of the art software and customize search queries to our clients' industries, accounting systems, and date file formats.  This enables us to find many types of overpayment errors, including: duplicate payments, payments to incorrect vendors, and missed discounts.  It also enables to identify multiple types of fraud.

What really sets Morey & Company apart from our peers is our audit team.  The level of professional A/P audits is directly related to the individuals providing the service and their supportive resources.  Our team consists of Certified Public Accountants who have additional certifications in Financial Forensics, Fraud Examination, and Electronic Discovery.    Our team has worked with some of the largest organizations in the world recovering millions of dollars in overpaid monies.  Some of the areas we'll review include:

Duplicate Payments

State and Local Tax

Contract Compliance

Vendors who Violate Benford's Law

Abnormal Invoice Activity

Abnormal/Fraudulent Vendor Activity

Abnormal/Fraudulent Employee Activity

Duplicate Payments

Our specialized queries search for duplicate invoices using a variety of methodologies.  If there is an overpayment reflected in the data, we will find it.  Or, if there are overpayments that can be identified only by manually reviewing files, our highly trained team will discover it.

Taxes can be confusing - they are ever changing, and vary by state to state.  Most organizations don't have staff dedicated to keep up with the massive amount of tax rules and regulations.   At Morey & Company, our team reviews a multitude of state and local tax categories during our audit process and routinely identify and recover overpayments related to sales and use tax, franchise tax, property tax, severance tax, and excise tax, etc.  Our specialized software allows us to identify tax overpayments from multiple data base types - if needed we'll also conduct manual audits in order to bring the maximum amounts to our clients.

Contract Compliance

Organizations spend a great deal of time and money negotiating the best possible terms for their procurement contracts.  Discounts, rebates, and price variances are common components of these arrangements.  Our team will review your procurement contracts to make sure your business fully benefits from those contracts.

Vendors Who Violate Benford's Law

Benford's law is a naturally occurring phenomenon whereby the digit "1" appears most frequently in invoice amounts.  We use Benford's Law to detect vendors with unusual patterns of invoice amounts - patterns that violate Benford's Law and point to fraudulent, fabricated amounts.

Abnormal Invoice Activity

• Vendors who have a large percentage of rounded-amount invoices
• Vendors who consistently pay quickly, typically in less than 10 days
• Vendors with many invoices just below approval amounts
• Vendors with rapid increases in invoice volume
• Vendors with a higher percentage of cancelled or voided checks

Abnormal/Fraudulent Vendor Activity

• Vendor and employee files are cross checked by address, Tax ID, phone number, and bank routing numbers – if available
• Vendors with P.O. boxes, or mail drops (Mail Boxes Etc...)

Abnormal/Fraudulent Employee Activity

• Vendor and employee files are cross checked by address, Tax ID, phone number, and bank routing numbers - if available
• Employees with PO boxes as a primary address

Morey & Company will adapt your audit to your goals and desired audit levels.  Each audit is designed and conducted to satisfy specific client objectives.  We will identify, validate, collect, and deliver the overpaid monies to our clients - all in a seamless, integrated manner.   Since we are confident that our approach will result in the identification and recovery of overpayments, we don't get paid until our clients realize savings.  

At the end of each audit we can also provide a memorandum with customized recommendations to minimize recurrence of errors in the future.  At Morey & Company we maximize your recoveries and leave you with solutions to help you further enhance the value of your organization.