Slide 4 - Join a vendor database with an employee database to find records in which a vendor address matches an employee address

The false vendor is a common fraud in which someone has sent your company an invoice for a good or service that was never provided. We investigated a false vendor scheme in which an employee hit the company for around $6 million. The perpetrator was an IT Manager who had a substantial budget to purchase network hardware. He had created a shell company, and he’d use the funds from his employer to purchase the hardware from a legitimate vendor through his shell company. Then, he’d mark up the price of the hardware by a small percentage and “sell” it to his employer.

One of the ways we seek false vendors is by joining the vendor or accounts payable database with a personnel database and extracting records from each that have common addresses, phone number, contact names, or tax IDs. Below, you can see the result of a join between the vendor master and a Human Resources database after we’ve extracted common addresses between the databases. You can also see that we’ve used a trick - we capitalized the letters in the address field and removed the punctuation in case the addresses were slightly different in each system. The top record, Gray Investments, with the same address as employee Darrin Harris, is a false vendor.