Speaker: Sean Ross
How has Oversight benefited you and your team?
Sean Ross: Hi, I'm Sean Ross. I'm a Senior Manager of Asset Protection here at HD Supply. And the question posed is how has Oversight benefited me and my team. It's been quite a bit actually, over the past six years that we've used Oversight. We have really learned how to fine tune it and use it to our benefit. One of the things that we do is we look for policy violations with a big company like ours, making sure that everybody is trained properly on travel policy and submitting expense reports, is difficult. So when we see people breaking policy through their, their submissions, then we can track kind of what departments they're coming from and kind of target some of the training towards those departments so that we have less policy violations going down the road. Oversight allows us to track this and we can see that on a Dashboard, we can see our improvement, and where our weaknesses are as far as our training goes. The other thing that we do is we, we recover a quite a bit of money, from, employees who, inadvertently, most of the time, almost all the time, inadvertently, submit, duplicate expenses. and that those would be payments that would be going to the employee. And if we weren't on top of that, we wouldn't get that money back. Unless the employee was very honest and came forward and said that they got overpaid. So we track that as well and every year we save hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that, that's helped us quite a bit. Another thing that we do is is we work with the finance team, to make sure that the P Cards are being handled properly and that they're matched up with proper PO's and, and that helps kind of streamline the payment portion, which really doesn't benefit my team, but I thought I'd throw that in there. And we, we, it gives us a lot of things to look at. So when I say that, I mean, it kind of gives us the crumbs to start our, our investigation. and we, we try to be diligent and look into everything. There's uh 99% of probably 99.9% of everything that we look into is just an employee making an error, which happens and that's ok. And, and we reach out to that employee, let them know that they made an error doesn't even have to have a financial impact on us or the employee. But if we see a policy violation and we make sure that they're understanding the policy properly. Another thing that we do is is the investigation portion. So I say 99.9% of the employees are, are good employees. You still have that, you know, 0.01% that is going to try and defraud the company. So it gives us those crumbs and, and we can start looking into things that we see in Oversight and you start to see patterns and, and it's seamlessly attached to, Concur. So when when I see something in Oversight, a lot of times I'll go on to Concur and look at every report and see if there's anything, any anomalies that, that may not flag an oversight. and that really kind of gives us our, our launching point to look into things further. and that's helped us quite a bit.
Any good stories?
Sean Ross: Yeah. So now they're asking me if, if I have any good stories and honestly, I would need probably three hours of video to tell you all the good stories that I have, related to the fraud that we've detected, through Oversight and and the employees who are defrauding the company using their corporate card. sadly, but, I do, I do have a couple of really good stories. one is a fairly senior person who was who handled the region, traveled quite a bit, his corporate card quite a bit. And over that period of time, over about a two year period of time, he defrauded the company about $18,000. Oversight allowed us to, or I should say Oversight kind of pointed out that there was some anomalies in, in his expenses. There was two, I think that flagged, I think one was a mileage with a gas expense and a gas expense without a rental car. so I started digging into it a little bit and I went over to Concur to kind of look at some of his expense reports. And as I did, I, I saw a kind of expensive meal on a Friday night where he was "entertaining" customers. And I saw that the bill was closed out at 10 30 at night. And I thought that was interesting because most people, you know, want to be home with their family or friends on a Friday night and they, they don't want to be out with, you know, somebody who wants to buy them dinner from a company, you know, so as I looked into it, I realized that he had used the just the credit card receipt as the receipt for the expense which is against our company policy. We, we require detailed receipts. And and so I, I reached out to the, the restaurant and asked for the detailed receipt and they sent it to me. The detail receipt showed that it was actually a transaction on Saturday. So I found that to be very concerning. and as I looked at the detail receipt, it had two adult meals, three kids meals. I knew this person had three kids and several adult beverages as well. So that really kind of got my, got my interest going and the more and more I dug, the more and more I found on this person. He was doing several different things. If you're an investigator, you know, that typically people have kind of a pattern and they'll stick with the things that they're comfortable with. but this person was kind of all over the, all over the board on the things that he was doing. the other case that I had was another person in a department that, uses a software that's fairly expensive and they have a lot of users. So the bill for that software was anywhere from $2600 to $3600 a month. And he had one of his employees expensing that charge every month and not handling it properly. It should have gone through billing. but he was signing off on it through most of the year and then, somewhere in, in August of the year that I found it he actually started using the same receipt that his employee was submitting for this expense and he started submitting the expense, fraudulently. After Oversight caught this was showing up as a duplicate expense. it popped up and it, it was a duplicate expense with a different employee. So that was kind of strange because, you know, usually those are just kind of matches that, the, the dollar amount is the same. It's from Hertz rental car, two different employees and you dig into it and it, and it turns out that it's just, you know, two people that travel to the same city on the same dates, you know. but this one kind of stood out because of the dollar amount and, also it didn't seem to make sense that his employee was expensing it and then he was expensing it. so as I dug into that, it was, it became pretty clear that he was defrauding the company. that was a case that we were able to resolve, fairly quickly, without a whole lot of impact to the company. and we were able to take care of the problem. but overall, like love, love Oversight. And I think there's so many facets to it that I wish I could cover in a five minute video, but I can't. I'm sure if you talk to Oversight, they'll fill you in on, on everything that is out there. and something that's not really part of the, any of the questions that I wanted to fit in here. Is that any time I have a problem or a question or anything, the Oversight team is really, they, they just jump on it. They take care of the problem and they take care of us. So that's it. Thanks.
