Procurement & finance
Recovery Audit
A retrospective review of payments made, looking for money paid in error — duplicates, overpayments, missed credits, unclaimed discounts. It recovers real cash, and its existence is an indictment of the controls upstream.
Recovery audits work. That is the uncomfortable part: they consistently find money, which means the money was consistently being lost, by organisations that believed their payment controls were adequate.
The right response is not to run more recovery audits. It is to fix the three-way match, the duplicate-vendor records and the tolerance monitoring that let the money out — and to treat what the audit finds as a specification for what to fix.