First, I'd like to offer a big thanks to everyone who responded to our query last week about vendors who refused to send paper invoices. Your comments are being compiled into what looks like a rather long document with, it turns out, tons of good advice. This will be shared with all respondents - probably in a few weeks - when we finish putting it together. So, there's still time to put your two cents in and get a copy of this useful intelligence.

As you may recall, a reader wrote inquiring about a vendor who refused to send a paper invoice, insisting on either a fax or email. As it turns out, many vendors are sending invoices this way and our readers, an ever innovative bunch, have developed some interesting ways of dealing with this lack of paper. To be honest the majority like not getting the paper.

In an interesting turn of events, one of the readers who wrote about this new phenomenon noted that one of her vendors actually was charging if a customer insisted on a paper invoice!

You heard it here first. Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow is declaring war on duplicate payments. While we recognize that it is impossible to completely eliminate duplicate payments, we do believe it is possible to seriously reduce the number of those annoying payments - seriously!

As you probably already are aware, we are conducting a Duplicate Payment survey with an Executive Summary of the results going to all participants. The preliminary results are pretty interesting and lead us to conclude that the battle against duplicate payments is far from over. In fact, it is heating up on some fronts. That's why we are making October Duplicate Payment Obliteration month. Each weekly ezine that month will have at least one tip you can use in your own war against duplicates.

We are developing a Duplicate Payment Resource Center section of our website which we hope to launch on or before October 1. There will be some opportunities for vendor participation in that endeavor.

As you may already know, the October issue of our print newsletter, Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow will be expanded to 24 pages so it can also serve as our Fall Journal. All the articles will focus on helping our readers get rid of duplicate payments and recover those that have already been made. That's just the start. Readers who are not subscribers to Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow can preorder this $39.95 publication by sending a note to publisher@ap-now.com with the words Fall Journal in the subject line and weˇ¦ll send you the Order Form.

We've created a series of four Webinars all addressing different aspects of the problem. They are:

• "October 10 Preventing Duplicate Payments: A Best Practice Approach
• "October 17 Using Excel to Search for Duplicate Payments: A Step by Step Approach
• "October 24 How to Get the Most out of A Duplicate Payment Audit Firm
• "October 31 Finding Duplicate Payments Yourself: A 25 Step Low-Tech Approach

Does it make any sense to you that a state would return unclaimed property to a company that wasn't reporting and not bother to check if the company was in compliance? This is an issue that has bothered me for years. Every time I asked the experts about- something I would do at least once a year-I was told the two were not related and there was no cause for concern. But, the issue continued to bother me and I continue to ask about it.

And finally I got some validation that I am not completely off in left field-at least on this issue anyway. When I asked this question at our April Unclaimed Property seminar this year, Tracey Reid, one of the presenters started to laugh. It seems she had a client in that very predicament. And, just for grins I asked it of her again at our Webinar last week on Unclaimed Property: How to Get in Compliance if You've Never Filed (CD available). It appears her business is growing thanks to unwitting employees trying to do a good thing for their employers.

Our advice regarding claiming unclaimed property is this. Only do it if you are in compliance with the unclaimed property laws. Otherwise you are effectively waving a red flag in front of the auditors and could come to their attention when you might have stayed under the radar for a little longer. But, keep in mind, this is only a "sooner rather than later" situation. The states have made it clear they intend to audit most, if not all, companies who should be reporting within the next few years.

That is why we keep making such a big deal about compliance. We do not want our readers to be caught uniformed or worse - end up confronted by an auditor intent on a doing a 20-year audit of his or her organization. And, yes, that can happen if you have never reported. That's why we're holding two one-day Unclaimed Property seminars in Cincinnati and Los Angeles as well as another Unclaimed Property webinar on October 7.

Did you know that the IRS thinks that a portion of the tax gap is due to income being reported improperly? This year they are focusing on independent contractors who should have been classified as employees. That's just one of the reasons we've invited Greta Hicks to address the very important topic of "Are Your Independent Contractors Really Independent?" on October 16.

That's almost a month after Cyrus Daftary returns on September 22 to share his considerable expertise in a Best Practice Webinar on dealing with B-Notices.

• Master Vendor File Cleanup Webinar August 20
• Take the Duplicate Payment Survey
• The Unclaimed Property Show clip
• Order John Wiley & Sons books at a 15% discount (Wiley link bottom of page)
• The Unclaimed Property seminar

I'm starting a Accounts Payable: Times Are a-Changin List. If you've got any examples of bad practices that used to be best practices or best practices that no longer work, I'd love to hear from you. Similarly, if you have thoughts on this subject, I'm all ears - well, maybe eyes, would be more accurate. I'm not sure what I'll do with the information, but I am curious to see how big the list turns out to be. Send your thoughts to marys@ap-now.com - I love hearing from you.

Until next week, thanks for listening.
Mary Schaeffer
Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow, a CRYSTALLUS, Inc. publication

CRYSTALLUS, Inc, publisher of Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow, is a woman-owned business and is registered as a Federal Government CCR vendor.