Direct work attributed to: Kay
The Challenge
This company had strict government regulation behind each pharmaceutical event to prevent bribery in the medical industry. The government strictly mandates the amount you can pay to host these lunches, so the meals have to be under a specific threshold per person. The event calculations had to be double check after the event, so it the per person meal was too high because of a miscalculation, it was too late. The events needed audited but they were short staffed and therefore, behind. There was no way to determine if the events were all in compliance or not.
The Solution
All events needed to be calculated and compared to the event planner’s calculations and any items not aligning should be corrected. Anything that was erroneously pushed over the governed threshold would need to be brought to the attention of management.
Step 1:
Identifying failures & finding solutions.
Event coordinators were so busy with planning and communicating with attendees, hotels, and restaurants, the risk of miscalculations was high. Since the government mandates costs related to these events, every lunch needed the calculations double checked to ensure they were all compliant. The audits hadn't been performed in a month or more, so they need to be tackled right away.
Step 2:
Getting to work and establishing accuracy.
Each event was calculated based on total event costs and per person meal costs. The numbers were checked once, and then again before moving forward with a passed audit. This was a pretty straight forward process but took a lot of calculations and multi-level reviews.
Step 3:
Implementing new processes to move forward confidently and accurately.
There was no way to prevent the erroneous calculations during the planning because restaurant menus were changing rates up to the actual event. What this meant is that the company needed to know about these errors as soon as possible so they were able to strategize on handling the issue. Errors were caught in this audit and caused some panic within the executive team because of the risks they were exposed to.
Guidelines were set for a standard timeframe of audit checks and a prioritization was installed for this process.
The Results
The company was caught up and reassured on the status of past event’s compliance. They were also finally aware of the errors that were caught during this audit and were in a much more informed position. Because of our implementation of time-based and layered audit methods, the company was able to plan for maintaining the timely monitoring of any events that may raise red flags.
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Many companies struggle with problems like these. Maybe you have something a little different going on, or maybe you just need help and don't know what you need. You don't have to know everything about your accounting right now. You don't need to know how to do it, just how to recognize it. Reach out so we can get you there.
