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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

This is how corporate works. They have budgets for things. The money doesn't come out of the pocket of the person who cuts the cheque. You send in an invoice and it gets paid. If it doesn't, the company is insolvent or they are at risk to lawsuits which will cost them more than your paltry $18000. But they don't even think about the lawsuit part. Bill comes in, cheque goes out.

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At my company, AP matches every invoice against a PO, and project managers/department heads are also responsible for approving invoices to be paid, so there are two chances to catch fake invoices or wrong amounts, etc.

Can you give my boss the 101? He has me methodically checking invoices against tenders. I would actually argue the other way. As our consultants rely on our return business, they would quickly solve any problem with the invoice even if not to the letter correct. We have bargaining power and they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.

Depends on how burned your boss has been. For a while finance departments just paid invoices without question. It was a lot cheaper than what we have now. Then someone in finance did an audit of a routine invoice (a random thing to show a junior how it could be done if requested) and discovered the "services rendered" on the invoice was just sending an invoice - no other work was being done. Now the company spends a lot of money to carefully verify every invoice is for real work done. It might cost more money in the long run but it doesn't feed fraud.

The above might be an urban legend, but it is still a good story.

I'm sure there was plenty of this sort of fraud occurring in the 1950s and such, but technology has enabled this sort of thing a lot lately. Not quite the same but closely related, the "email from the 'CEO' explaining why you need to wire money to this numeric account" is a huge and very profitable scam right now. That stunt may have been possible 50 years ago, but modern scale, tools like LinkedIn making it easy to target the employees that might have that authority, etc. make it all way easier. Oblivious companies get burned quickly nowadays.

In the late 80s or early 90s I was interviewing for a data entry job at General Motors, and was told that they were getting burned frequently by blindly paying incoming invoices for goods or services that were never provided. I was surprised a scam that simple would be so effective.

Find a company that has been massively successful but is on the verge of irrelevance.

When I used to work at body-shopping consulting firm, we had one client (one the largest bank in country) that would argue over 15 minutes over estimates...

How do they prevent paying random people who decide it'd be funny to send them an invoice?

Random people who didn't think it was funny but actually tried to make money off of this scheme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19476018

This is actually a really big problem called invoice fraud. Many companies struggle in setting up some workable system to prevent it.

The problem usually is that someone at the accounts payable department (sometimes in a different building or country) must pay all the hundreds or thousands of incoming invoices. Having a robust system in place for them to check if the product/service is actually delivered for the price agreed upon (or even delivered at all) is hard.

Usually they use purchase orders initiated by the buyer/manager to solve this sort of problem.

Hiring a freelancer? Issue a purchase order to the freelancer for the maximum amount you think you'll pay them. They then bill you for how many hours it actually took, after completing the job. Then accounting can process it if it's under the PO value.

No PO, invoice doesn't get paid.

This happens more than you would like to know. Especially during summer vacations. You need some sort of tracking system to know what to pay and what not to.

Isn't that what most spam targeted to businesses is?

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