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A new business analytics monitoring tool called Advana Improper Payments is here to help the Department of Defense (DoD) reduce improper payments, waste, fraud, and abuse. In place since December, Advana Improper Payments replaces DFAS's business activity monitoring (BAM) tool and offers new capabilities for detecting improper payments.
BAM was a tool put in place in 2010 as a requirement of the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act. The act requires federal agencies to make every effort to confirm that the right recipient receives the right payment, for the right reason, at the right time. Lead Accountant for the improper payment team in ESS Accounts Payable, Cristie McClellan, explained how BAM fulfilled this requirement.
"It received daily files of new invoices and updates to existing invoices from six different entitlement systems. Those files are run through a series of business rules that DFAS has developed to look for different types of errors such as duplicate payments, payments to the wrong vendor, and financing errors."
The BAM contract expired in 2020, and now the new Advana Improper Payments tool will provide phased improvements over the legacy system.
"We chose Advana because it's government-owned, which means there's a cost savings to DFAS of $20.7 million over the next five years in switching to it. There's also a lot more opportunity to expand improper payment detection beyond what it was with BAM by using existing interfaces and data that Advana has throughout the DoD," McClellan said.
Phase one, the transition away from BAM, was led by the BAM project management office (PMO) in Enterprise Solutions and Standards (ESS). The phase was a collaborative effort with ESS Accounts Payable, Accounts Payable Operations at each DFAS site, DFAS IT, and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (OuSD). The transition was complete in December 2020 and included standing up the tool and replicating the same functionality that existed within BAM.
McClellan and the collaborative teams are now in phase two, which looks to expand Advana to other entitlement systems beyond what BAM offered. This will include Army's General Fund Enterprise Business System (GFEBS), Navy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Defense Agencies Initiative (DAI).
The final phase will expand upon current business rules to help identify new improper payments and potential fraud from data available in Advana that was not present in BAM.
Over the past 10 years, BAM helped prevent 68,992 improper payments totaling $16.8 billion. Thanks to Advana's advanced analytics, DFAS expects to see even more success in improper payment detection over the coming years.
| Date Taken: | 03.10.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 12.28.2021 15:35 |
| Story ID: | 412041 |
| Location: | CLEVELAND, OHIO, US |
| Web Views: | 235 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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