In response to increasing employer concern regarding internal fraud and abuse associated with the use of purchasing or procurement cards (P-Cards), ACL has announced the availability of a P-Card Fraud solution. Designed to prevent fraud, improve policies, and promote cost management, ACL’s all-in-one package provides the tools, training, and consulting expertise to manage more than 20 fraud-related risks inherent in the use of P-Card programs.

According to ACL’s 2013 GRC Technology Pulse Survey of 2,200 audit, risk management, and compliance professionals, risk related to internal fraud and abuse is an area of the highest concern. Fraudulent use of P-Cards ranks among the most commonly occurring types of employee fraud. If any risk exists for this type of activity to become widespread within an organisation, not only can the total monetary losses become considerable, but a culture that promotes fraudulent behaviour can also become prevalent.

P-card Fraud Solution
The components of the new fraud control solution include:

Series of best practices for policies and administration of P-Card programs

1. A consolidated and optimised set of key controls that address 20 common risks in P-Card programs not adequately managed by built-in controls and expense management systems
2. Ten continuous monitoring data analytics that implement real-time monitoring of complete transaction populations, automating those key controls
3. A repeatable process, set of control definitions, and workflow to document and remediate gaps
4. Executive dashboards, which bring together the activities above to form a central location for key stakeholders to gain increased visibility of fraud, waste, and abuse tied to P-Card programs

ACL’s P-Card Fraud solution, organisations are able to identify questionable transactions rapidly and remediate issues without having to spend the time and effort associated with manual controls testing. The comprehensive solution is able to analyse 100% of P-Card transactions, in contrast to relying on limited sampling, which may catch one large instance of fraud, while failing to identify an accumulation of small infractions that add up to significant sums, which tends to be a more common scenario.

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P-cards can be very useful and effective. However, P-card programmes need to set up with great care, and employers need to adopt best practices to operate them. ACL wouldn’t be launching P-card Fraud control solution if there weren’t serious potential for fraud.