Oversight Systems Announces Solution for Preventing P-Card Abuse

July 10, 2008

Oversight Systems, Inc., the leading provider of automated transaction monitoring software, today announced that the company’s industry-leading software is now in use at Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies as a solution for preventing fraud and misuse in corporate purchase-card (p-card) programs.

“Procurement or purchase cards are becoming commonplace with employees around the globe because of the significant cost savings over paying invoices with checks,” Oversight CEO Patrick Taylor said. “The more employees use these cards, the greater the risk that fraud, misuse and policy violations go undiscovered.”

According to a recent industry survey sponsored by Oversight Systems, 77 percent of respondents cite policy adherence as a primary challenge in monitoring p-card use to prevent fraud. Although p-card providers offer services designed to prevent violations – such as setting spending limits on individual transactions or limiting card use to authorized merchant types by Merchant Category Code (MCC) – they only look at one data source – p-card transactions. Without visibility into the organization’s overall financial systems data, they cannot identify potential policy violations that can only be surfaced in this broader context.

“Human resources records, accounts payable transactions, employee expense reports, and other internal or external data sources have to be analyzed in conjunction with p-card data in order to identify such incidents of fraud, misuse or policy violation,” Taylor said. “Oversight’s continuous monitoring software inspects the integrity of each financial transaction across these relevant systems, so it can expose suspicious activities.”

One of the companies using Oversight's continuous p-card auditing is a global Fortune 500 retailer that was able to identify over 250 travel and expense policy violations worth nearly $1 million within the first six months of their Oversight implementation.

Another client, a government agency tasked with monitoring and enforcing policy regarding the use of statewide p-cards, selected Oversight’s On-Demand solution, because of its rapid implementation features. This option gives the agency an opportunity to see immediate results, with data extraction and analytics for p-card monitoring available out-of-the-box, as well as the flexible reporting structure the agency required.

“Oversight's continuous p-card auditing provides organizations with an immediate way to reduce costs while decreasing their fraud risks. In this tough economic environment, controlling costs while reducing risk is more important than ever,” Taylor said. “For this reason, many companies that use our software to monitor accounts payable, general ledger or other financial transactions are reaching out to us now to add our p-card monitoring capabilities.”

About Oversight Systems, Inc.
Oversight Systems uniquely delivers on the promise of continuous monitoring, with real-time transaction integrity inspection for identifying fraud, misuse and errors. Oversight’s software provides a platform for continuous monitoring with powerful analytics that excel at finding problems, then raises the bar with an investigator’s workbench for cost-effectively fixing the problem, and workflow-enabled audit trail and journaling for proving problem resolution and compliance. By inspecting each step of individual transactions across all financial systems, Oversight identifies all errors and fraud, drives defects out of the process, and sustains regulatory compliance. For more information, visit www.oversightsystems.com.