Reducing Improper Payments

In today’s stormy fiscal environment, ensuring that federal dollars are spent as intended is critical. Establishing effective accountability measures to prevent and reduce improper payments, and to recover overpayments, becomes an even higher priority.

Because of inefficient and disparate procure-to-pay processes, human error and pricing discrepancies, federal organizations often suffer from undetected losses and overpayments amounting to millions of dollars each year.

Many organizations are unaware of the extent of their annual losses from overpaying supplier invoices or from incorrectly computing deductions and allowances. Still others are aware of the problem but are uncertain about how to take cost-effective corrective action.

Identifying and analyzing causes of improper payments will be a key to developing effective corrective actions to move to the next phase of reducing and preventing improper payments in the federal government.

Accenture is helping organizations achieve high performance with innovative prevention, detection and recovery services that combine people, process and technology to deliver immediately measurable results. With the appropriate audit and analytics tools and techniques, agencies can drive toward high performance. These tools and techniques include:

• Post-payment recovery audit—A combination of processes, proprietary technology and experienced personnel to help identify lost funding and recover overpayments, duplicate or erroneous payments.
  
  
• Business analytics—Analysis of payables transactions to locate process weaknesses and identify opportunities to enhance finance capabilities.
  
  
• Prevention of overpayments—Technology toolsets to help detect and prevent vendor overpayments in real time and monitor transaction accuracy.

The potential benefits that agencies can achieve are significant:

• Increased internal controls and contract validation
• Better alignment of resources, enabling a clearer focus on business issues
• Accurate payments and improved cash flow
• Reduced rework, collection effort, and overall post-audit costs

Accenture Transaction Compliance & Analytics

Especially developed for prevention of overpayments and under-recoveries, this application enables pre-payment reviews and is designed to minimize requirements for traditional post-payment audits. Accenture has enabled organizations to prevent and recover more than $270 million through the Accenture Transaction Compliance and Analytics solution.

Read a short summary on Accenture Improper Payment services.