Why do duplicate vendor records matter?

Four separate failures, one root cause

The performance history splits, so a subcontractor with a bad record under one spelling looks unblemished under the other. The suspension is dodged, because it was applied to a record rather than to a company. Concentration exposure is understated, because two records look like two vendors carrying half the risk each.

And duplicate payments walk straight through, because the control that would have caught them was looking for a matching vendor ID and there were two.

Sometimes innocent. Sometimes not.

Most duplicate records are created by somebody in a hurry who could not find the existing one. That is an interface problem and it is fixable.

But some are created deliberately, by somebody who knows exactly what the second record achieves — and given that corruption features in roughly half of construction fraud cases, that possibility deserves more than a shrug. A vendor master that fuzzy-matches on names, licences, bank accounts and directors is a fraud control as much as an admin one.

The fix is cheap and nobody does it

Fuzzy matching at registration — on the trade licence number, the bank account, the directors, and the name with its variants. Ownership declarations cross-checked against your own employee records, because related-party dealing is the other half of the corruption picture.

None of this is difficult. It is just invisible until it isn’t — which is a fair description of most master-data work, and precisely why it gets deferred until a recovery auditor is charging you a percentage to find what it would have prevented.

Terms

• Duplicate Vendor Record