Ask yourself 3 questions.

1. Do you verify that the goods, works or services were provided?
2. Do you monitor changes in your master vendor data?
3. Can a payment be made without an invoice?

If you don’t know the answer to these questions, 

It may be an indication of your financial loss.

Consider this case example.

We were asked by an international client to look at a potential bribery risk.

As part of our approach, we usually like to start 

with payment data and work backwards 

to determine the level of fraud risk 

and number of individuals 

involved.

Concerned about the procurement and payment controls,

as a starting point, we asked two simple questions…

• What are the levels of advanced payments?
• What are the number of bank accounts changes?

In a 6 month period you might expect to see a few changes.

In this case there were hundreds of changes.

The patterns included…

1. 8 different suppliers payments being made to a personal bank account
2. missing bank account data to verify where payment was made
3. 1 supplier payment made to an offshore account

So, at this point…

Ask yourself.

• Is it the same team member inputting data into the system?
• Is there an invoice, purchase order and requisition for the payment? 

There are many ways in which you can analyse your own data.

Put simply…

• Do you take a standardised approach to data analysis?
• Daily analysis will help your early detection rates.
• Are you analysing your data frequently?

So…

Are you going to be more consistent in your analysis?

What changes are you going to make to your data analysis approach?

Risk assess how you collect and analyse your own data.

If it’s not being assessed you won’t know what you’re missing.