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Improper Payment Reduction — Federal |
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Improper Payment Reduction — Corporate |
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Risk Management |
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Internal Audit |
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SOX Compliance |
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Fraud Investigations |
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ERP Implementation |
Specktrum's Value Proposition to the Federal Government: Continuously Protect the US Treasury against abusive, wasteful or inappropriate spending.
President Obama's Executive Order signed in November 2009 titled "Reducing Improper Payments and Eliminating Waste in Federal Programs," calls for a number of measures designed to dramatically reduce the tremendous amount of waste and abuse in agency and grant payments. The provisions include issuing "recommendations on new internal control techniques agencies could use to better detect and mitigate improper payments (including deployment of forensic auditing tools by management and internal control testing requirements)".
Specktrum's forensic audit techniques already exist and have a quantifiable track record of preventing over $350M in improper payments in the private sector at two public companies over a 4 year period. Specktrum's solution for Federal and State Governments, Treasury-Protect, is a forensic and continuous auditing system that has the ability to detect waste and fraud prior to payment issuance. In the case of several private sector audits, $229M of the $350M was detected by Specktrum's proprietary approach that prevented improper payments from ever being issued.
Specktrum's Treasury-Protect is designed to detectlow percentage error rates in environments with large volumes of transactions by employing state of the art forensic and continuous auditing techniques. When applied to large volume governmental spending programs such as in Medicaid and Medicare, where improper payment rates are believed to be around 24%, corrections can be made to wasteful improper payments including fraud, prior to disbursement. Detection and correction can take place before the wire or ACH is transmitted or the checks are printed.
Since Specktrum's Treasury-Protect acts as a detective mechanism as it also addresses the internal control directive of President Obama's recent Executive Order. Additionally, root cause analysis with recommendations to upstream processes and controls are part of this solution. At Sprint-Nextel, the Treasury Protect system led to dozens of control and process changes and optimizations that improved disbursement accuracy to Six Sigma levels.
Relying on Recovery activities alone can be costly in that they are in arrears, fail to pick up 100% of the improper payments made, including those that are incomplete.
Treasury-Protect is live and encompasses a much wider sphere, covering upstream operations providing approved files to AP and Payroll to determine the validity of the payee and amount. This includes audits of IT based transactions such as imports and code changes that can affect how a batch is stored.
At Specktrum we track root cause of improper payments thus allowing a complete remedy which prevents future ocurrences. Ultimately Treasury-Protect is designed to be part of the protective fabric of an agency acting as the continuous watchdog of the US or State Government coffers.