Challenges
- High volume of errors and duplicates: around 5,000 erroneous payment requests each week, amounting to $60 million in potential losses, including overpayments, duplicate payments and payments to incorrect recipients
- Fragmented legacy systems: more than 70 agencies submitting payments through a patchwork of home-grown systems and paper-based processes, each agency with its own preferences and workflows, making it difficult to standardise or automate checks
- Manual controls and limited audit capacity: audits conducted through labour-intensive checklists and batch processing, often sampling only a fraction of transactions, with any change to audit rules requiring IT intervention and constraining auditors' ability to adapt to new risks
- Operational bottlenecks: variations in check printing and mail processing complicated workflows, with staffing heavily focused on data entry and manual review
- Risk to public trust: every payment error risked not just financial loss but public confidence in the stewardship of taxpayer funds
Solutions
- Automated procure-to-pay controls: replaced error-prone manual audit checklists with automated transaction controls, letting the Treasury audit 100% of voucher data submitted by all state agencies rather than relying on limited sampling
- Standardisation and integration: converted legacy voucher transmittals and payment files across agencies into standardised electronic formats compatible with SAP and PeopleSoft
- Technology delivery: a transaction monitoring solution integrated with PeopleSoft, processing over 100,000 payment vouchers per day
- Preventative enforcement: new functionality automatically places suspect vouchers on hold in PeopleSoft until reviewed and approved by auditors
- Operational efficiency: automation and standardisation reduced transaction processing staffing by approximately 50%, redeploying staff from manual data entry to roles requiring higher skill sets
- Continuous risk assessment: ongoing risk assessment and control monitoring enforce policies and payment limits dynamically, flagging any attempt to bypass controls for review and investigation
Results
- Saved $30 million: eliminating erroneous and duplicate payments saved the Treasury $30 million in six months and reduced financial leakage
- Increased efficiency: automated controls streamlined payment processing, reduced manual workload and enabled the Treasury to process billions in transactions more efficiently
- Reduced fraud and errors: 100% of payment incidents are reviewed before approval, significantly lowering the risk of fraud, error and improper payments
- Restored public trust: with every dollar accounted for and every transaction auditable, the Treasury reinforced public confidence in government