Tips to Prevent Duplicate Payments
Duplicate payments are a common audit risk and focus. Discovering duplicate payments quickly is critical as timing may impact the ability to recover the overpayment. If not addressed promptly, overpayments may be treated as a financial loss. Departments are expected to maintain strong internal controls to prevent duplicate payments.
As part of the annual Internal Control Certification, department heads confirm that CTR’s payment guidance (memos, policies, job aids, and training materials available on PowerDMS) is integrated into daily operations. Procedures must also ensure that any overpayments are identified and resolved within the current fiscal year.
Action Steps
- Ensure training and controls are in place to track total payments and confirm that identical amounts to a payee are not duplicates
- Monitor recurring payments with identical amounts to prevent overpayments
- Routinely review and reconcile expenditure reports by vendor, amount, invoice number, and purpose to identify potential duplicate payments
Your Internal Control Officer and Chief Fiscal Officer should review your written system of internal controls and daily procedures. This will ensure you have sufficient controls and monitoring in place to prevent duplicate payments and help verify that the department head is accurately certifying compliance in the annual Internal Control Certification.
Bookmark our CTR Compliance Corner as your one-stop shop for alerts and success factors that you can integrate into your daily operations to keep you safe on your mission.