Expense Reduction Analysts (ERA) Australia has not only achieved significant returns for Computer Sciences Corporation, but has also confirmed the integrity of the company's accounts payable (AP) system after a recent audit of its AP processes.
Computer Science Corporation (CSC) is a global IT company operating in the areas of
consulting, systems integration and outsourcing. Alan Chan, recently appointed as financial controller of the Australian company, was approached by Jeremy Gimson of ERA Recovery Services to discuss ERA's accounts payable recovery auditing service.
Given that I was new to the role, I felt that a historical audit of the integrity of our AP systems would be a positive move and would give me confidence in our systems," explains Alan.
Transactions scrutinised In this service, ERA normally audits approximately four years of AP transactions and looks for 'suspicious transactions'. Typically, ERA auditors find duplicate payments of invoices, wrong payments and missed GST input credits. ERA verifies that errors have not been corrected, puts a case to suppliers and recovers the funds on behalf of the client. ERA is then paid a proportion of the recovered funds.
ERA senior recovery auditor Jehan Salib worked closely with CSC to extract the data for analysis. Having isolated any irregular transactions, Jehan then worked for a short time in CSC's accounts payable department to verify which errors had not been corrected and to recover the outstanding funds.
"I was genuinely amazed that once we had given ERA the electronic data, they did everything," says Alan. "They gave me confidence that my systems were good and generated significant recoveries for CSC, money that I otherwise wouldn't have seen."
Significant recoveries
At the project's conclusion, ERA presented Alan Chan with an audit report, summarising the results and making minor recommendations for improvements. ERA also completed a diagnostic report, containing an in-depth look at CSC's payments and vendor data. For example, it identified replicated suppliers listings, which provide a risk of duplicate payments. Due to ERA's detailed detective work, significant recoveries were made, dating from as far back as 2000. Secondly, the recent performance of the CSC Accounts Payable Team has been excellent, with good procedures and few errors.
"The work that ERA did for us went far beyond merely recovering the funds owing." says Alan. "The diagnostic report was invaluable and I now have confidence that ail is well with my Accounts Payable system."
21-Aug-2007