Texas A&M prevented a $100,000 duplicate payment and identified $460,000 in erroneous T&E spend

Business Challenge

Texas A&M University is a public university situated in College Station, Texas. The university's financial auditing team encountered challenges due to high transactional volumes and lengthy audit processes. They were mainly focused on manual, sample-based expense report auditing and daily tasks, rather than prioritizing the monitoring of high-risk items and strategic issues.

Because Texas A&M did not have an AI-based auditing system in place, they were unable to monitor trends or track behavior, and therefore could not influence change in their expense management process. Additionally, one team of auditors was responsible for reviewing T&E, while outside auditors were tasked with reviewing payment cards (P-cards).

Given the limited resources and transactions across multiple platforms, the Texas A&M team needed new technology to centralize and view all their spend data in one place, to prevent further cash leakage

Solution

Texas A&M selected Oversight for pre-payment and post-payment capabilities and immediate monitoring of its programme’s transactions.

The Texas A&M Division of Finance and Operations chose Oversight because of its ability to monitor 100% of transactions right away and centralising data across payables, travel, purchasing cards and out-of-pocket expenses gave auditors a connected basis for identifying recurring issues and engaging employees.

Results

The team avoided a $100,000 duplicate payment and identified $460,000 in erroneous T&E spending.

It also identified more than $5M in confirmed P-Card issues and flagged $1.5M in non-compliant AP exceptions. Identified issues and exceptions are distinct from money recovered or prevented.

“We didn’t think we had that big of a problem, but it was bigger than we knew”, said Clint Merritt, Executive Director, Financial Management Operations. “With Oversight, we can identify common policy violations and can track violations by employee.”

Benefits

Auditors could concentrate on the riskiest transactions and use recurring patterns to target employee training. Communication records helped the team reinforce policy expectations and determine when further action was appropriate. Finance gained a clearer view of its contribution: preventing payment loss, identifying exposure and using evidence to improve compliance.

“With Oversight’s communication tracking capabilities between the auditor and employee, we can focus training on common issues to increase compliance and, when necessary, identify when disciplinary action is needed,” said Clint.