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Audit Commission

Audit Commission > National Fraud Initiative > Private sector > Services > Creditors screening

Creditors screening

What can creditors screening identify for your organisation?

  • VAT overpayments - NFI identifies potential VAT overpayments on individual invoices. You may then be able to recover the overpayments.
  • Duplicate payments - NFI matches your creditor payments to identify where you may have paid for the same goods or services more than once.
  • Duplicate creditors - NFI matches your creditors data to identify where you may have creditors set up more than once on your system, this can lead to inefficiency and duplicate payments.
  • Employee interests - If you provide both payroll and creditors data NFI could match them to identify instances where an employee and creditor are linked by the same bank account or the same address to identify employees that potentially have interests in companies that your organisation is trading with.

NFI provides creditor payment screening using a range of tests to identify duplicate payments. Aside from the financial benefits, data matching helps to improve the efficiency with which organisations maintain their creditor payment systems.

The NFI can help you identify duplicate payments and incorrect VAT payments that can be recovered; these can occur as a result of incorrect supplier invoices, input errors and VAT miscalculations. NFI can also help you strengthen your internal control arrangements, by highlighting system weaknesses or common errors within your creditor data.

The 2010/11 National Fraud Initiative identified £5.5 million of overpayments in this area.

Fees

The fee for creditors screening is £2100.

Further information