Top 5 easy ways to quickly defraud your company!

Are you an AP or procurement professional working with a team that relies on old-school ERP systems to conduct business? ...No modern AP or P2P tools integrated into the ERP?

If so, read on, because you are in for a treat: money! So much money. That’s right. We’re talkin’ big money. Big moolah mazuma smackaroos, you sly dog! But save the celebrations. First, we must learn. I will be your guide and will walk you through some best practices on how to quickly defraud your company and I mean quick so buckle up, kid. Who am I? Doesn’t matter. We were never here, we never had this conversation 🤫...

1. Spoof invoices/vendors

Create a fake vendor name and profile that your organization would realistically source from, and have fun with it! Something like “Stainless Steal Works Inc.” Get it? STEAL. Also “stainless” like a reputation free from wrongdoing (which is ALSO clever) but the point is, I have a blatant liberal arts degree and even I know how to pull off this math: send an invoice to AP with a fake vendor name and put in your routing numbers. The ERP won’t alert anyone to a newly paid vendor in the system but if you really want to sell it, fake approval by uploading a doctored email exchange between the CEO and Stainless Steal Works Inc. and never doubt your liberal arts degree again. Did someone say, “jack of all trades''? 

2. Change of details

Find an approved invoice in the system and change the applicable vendor’s routing information to your information. No. One. Will. Notice. The ERP doesn’t flag any changes to vendor details. Use an offshore, alias bank account to be on the safe side, but the ERP doesn’t cross-reference vendor details to your on-record employee details anyway, so you can probably roll the dice on that.

3. Duplicate payments

Is your supplier a dear friend? Send in a duplicate payment request to that supplier some days apart. The ERP won’t have any powerful logic that detects and prevents duplicate payments to a vendor, so you can pay them twice and then, you guessed it, take half. Cheers! We’re going to Vegas, baby, Vegas.

4. Check fraud

I mean, your company walked right into this one if they’re still writing checks. It is so easy to tamper with checks, especially if you are an authorized signer in AP and can just write yourself a check for fake expenses (or real expenses for items that you deliberately returned). Or, you can write two checks associated with one vendor invoice. Oopsie! Call the vendor, say that you accidentally sent two checks and have them send the second one to your personal P.O. box. Create an account with the vendor’s name, deposit the check into the account, take out all the cash or write yourself a check from that account. 

5. Manual intervention

Manual, offline AP process flows means less centralized oversight which means you can make bank with just a few keystrokes. Even if your previously-separated AP and procurement systems are now combined into one shared ERP system, if little-to-no business rules or role-based automation has been added, you can go absolutely wild! Blame someone else if you need to. Log into the AP system and change some vendor details here or there. Manually interfere at any point along the way, from Procure to Pay.

So there you have it - like taking candy from a baby.** Keep any talks about “AP automation” to a minimum and maximize your bank account. I cannot emphasize this enough: don’t let anyone encourage your team to “streamline supplier payment processes” or “take it to the cloud.” The only cloud you’ll be taking to is cloud nine. So get frauj-frauj (“fraudulent”) today and revel in a “get rich quick” scheme that actually works! 

**This is parody - it is not ethical or smart to defraud your (or any) company. Please read between the lines. Don’t go “hmm, I think I’ll try this at home.”