Procurement & finance
Maverick Spend
Purchasing that bypasses the agreed process — no purchase order, no approved supplier, no negotiated rate. It is almost never dishonest. It is people solving a problem faster than the process allows.
Which is the key to fixing it. Maverick spend is a symptom of a procurement process that is too slow for the site’s reality, and punishing it produces a site that hides it rather than a site that stops.
The costs are real, though: negotiated rates forfeited, no committed-cost visibility, and an invoice arriving for work nobody can find a PO for. The remedy is a process fast enough to use, plus a low-value channel that is genuinely quick.