Challenges
With revenues exceeding USD $10 billion, a petroleum and natural gas exploration and production company couldn’t afford to have even small breaches in their internal controls. The organization, however, lacked a controls systems to track policy breaches and to automatically monitor all of the data and transactions from a variety of departments, including accounts payable (AP) and vendor management, in real-time.
Although the company had moved from a manual solution to an AP workflow several years ago, a significant amount of manual work was still required. Adding to the problem, the employees managing the AP workflow were coders who weren’t properly trained to handle this task. Information was frequently missing, expenses not within limits were being approved, and information wasn’t being tracked properly.
Solution
To meet the requirements of getting to the root of their internal controls issues and monitoring their financial transactions in real-time, the energy company turned to CaseWare Monitor (now Alessa). The continuous controls monitoring platform was configured to identify potential areas of revenue leakage, strengthen internal controls and find opportunities to increase compliance.
After conducting a risk and controls assessment based on two years’ of data, the solution identified four key areas of risk within the organization: accounts payable, audit automation, purchase card, and vendor management.
Results
After identifying these departments as areas of high risk for the company, and using advanced analytics, Alessa revealed the following:
Accounts Payable
More than $614 million in discounts that had not been applied by 6,534 vendors despite agreed-upon payment terms and avenues for recourse
More than $1.2 million in approved payments that exceeded approval limits
More than $144 million in duplicate invoices from the same vendor
More than $3 million in duplicate invoices from multiple vendors for the same job, which occurred within two days (before or after) of the service date with a 5% variance in invoice amount
More than $66.5 million in payments that were approved and processed on 754 inactive wells
Almost 10,000 transactions involving more than $1.6 million were flagged as being potential personal purchases
Vendor Management
Over 2,000 duplicate vendors identified based on same vendor name and/or vendor address
Almost 400 matches between an employee and vendor bank account
80 employees that have a potential address match with vendors based on street and city
Results
Building on these dramatic results, the company now plans to expand the use of Alessa to other key business processes such as payroll, manual reporting processes and others to ensure all transactions are compliant with organizational policies.
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