Avoid Procurement Fraud – Common Attack Vectors and Strategies to Mitigate Risk

In 2018, when a director of alliances at Microsoft was indicted for creating fake invoices totaling $1.4 million and then changing bank account information to route payments to his personal accounts, it made headlines around the world. Now, for fraud trackers, it’s just another day at the office. 

Today, fraud accounts for up to 5% of annual revenues, and Procurement and Accounts Payable are often the largest driver of misappropriated funds.  Many companies process millions or billions of transactions per year.  Trying to determine instances of fraud from normal behavior can be akin to finding a needle in a haystack.  Finance and Accounting leaders are eager to find ways to cut through the noise to reduce risk efficiently and effectively.  

Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) can help Finance and Accounting leadership ensure that common procurement loopholes are not leveraged to commit fraud.  Some of the key loopholes that can be closed with properly monitored controls include:  

• Updating vendor master data and paying the same vendor 
• Creating invoices with mismatched receipts 
• Creating payments and approving the same payments 
• Vendor overpayment or double payment 

If you’re interested to learn how leading companies like Microsoft, Jabil, NBCUniversal, and BP are leveraging continuous controls monitoring to prevent accounts payable and procurement fraud, check out our eBook.