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Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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

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