We had our Fraud Webinar yesterday and there were tons of good questions, all of which are included along with the answers on the CD version of the event. Some of the stories made my hair stand straight up in the air. Here's one incident-and there were many more-that could have been avoided if positive pay had been in use.

"Someone got hold of one of an organization's checks and recreated it using a phony vendor, phony check number, and forging the real signatures and account numbers. It was caught because a very nice lady received a very large check from us for no good reason that she knew so she called. As it turned out, there were several phony checks in the same month, totaling almost $125,000. Most had already been cleared. Apparently they would send checks to anonymous folks via FedEx and then would steal the envelopes before the people got home. Unfortunately for them, this lady was there to receive the check and she was honest."

Although our CDs normally cost $159, the price on this will remain at $99 through the end of the year.

The December issue of our Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow print newsletter was mailed almost two weeks ago. Any regular subscriber who has not already received their issue should contact us immediately.

It contains articles on Invoice Best Practices, Advice on Tips Paid Out of Pocket, Surviving an AP Systems Conversion, Auditing Your P-card Activity, along with a handy 1099 Important Dates calendar and an update on the California Unclaimed Property situation.

WHY RETURNING CHECKS CAN BE A PROBLEM

Often in the corporate world, someone will request that rather than being mailed to the recipient, checks be returned to the requestor. This is a bad practice and a control point. Checks should not be returned to requestors for two simple reasons: it's inefficient and it opens the door to fraud. If you are scratching your head about the fraud, consider the following which one of my newsletter readers wrote about.

"A former employee, who was in charge of all the tradeshow planning, would request checks to be processed, payable to the tradeshows. The request was approved by the same person using the initials of their superior. This was common practice at that time, due to the lengthy traveling the superior does. Now when I think about it, how stupid were we to put that much trust in someone? We have a list of people allowed to sign the checks here, none are stamped. Those individuals signed these checks, trusting the former employee, and allowed me to return the checks to her believing they were getting sent to the tradeshows.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine it was possible for a check made payable to another business to be allowed to be deposited into a personal bank account. Five years into the situation, one of the VPs decided to find out why the tradeshows were costing so much. We found out why. This ordeal cost the company a lot of money. Since then we have drastically changed our policies. I will not give any check back to the requester. The only exception to this rule is that specific requests must be signed off by an officer of the company."

Is cleaning up your master vendor file on the agenda for 2008? As regular readers of this publication are aware, careful attention to the master vendor file will reduce both duplicate payments and the opportunity for internal fraud. If you are looking for a quick review of this issue, consider the Amazon short on this topic. At only 49¢ it can be downloaded immediately and shared with executives who might not fully appreciate the problems that can develop when the master vendor file is ignored.

And once you've ordered it, if you find you like the format, consider our shorts on Invoices and an overall AP Game Plan.

If you didn't get a chance last week to request our free Duplicate Payment White Paper, it is still available. Send a note to publisher@ap-now.com with the words Duplicate Payment White Paper in the subject line and your contact information in the body of the note.

And speaking of sending a note to publisher@ap- now.com, have you requested a copy of our Happy New Year puzzle? We'll have it waiting in your inbox on January 2 when you return from your New Year's Day celebration. We're working on it right now and it will be similar to one of the ones we sent during AP Recognition Week. We figure that whenever you return to work after the holidays, a little pick-me-up might be nice-especially if you are facing mounds of 1099s and year end closing work!

While of the subject of year end, we've still got a few copies left of last year's expanded year end issue with advice on all aspects of the year-end close. While we're talking about year end, we thought we'd tell you there's only one more issue of this e-zine left for 2007. But don't miss next week's issue. We'll be announcing the beginnings of our 2008 webinar program and a few special surprises.

We're going to give the staff the week between Christmas and New Year's off. We'll have a skeleton crew here to answer e-mail and phones and fulfill orders but that's about it.

Thanks for listening.
Mary Schaeffer
Editorial Director & Publisher
Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow, a CRYSTALLUS, Inc. publication