Corporate Terrorism

When you are dealing with a high volume of sensitive information, your firm is an open playground for corporate terrorists.  Especially if you do not take the time to safe guard your information and think outside of the box when it come to the volume of paperwork that flows into your cost center on a daily basis.

A corporate terrorist sole mission is to hurt a corporation ability to make money for it employees and shareholders whether it is intentionally or unintentionally.

I have worked 20 years in various support roles for small to large corporation. The problem with the mishandling of sensitive information I have seen is pretty common no matter where I am at.

Sensitive information consists of an employee’s personal information such address, birthday, social security and mother maiden’s name.  Sensitive information could also contains key supplier information and sensitive pricing information.

Corporation needs to consider implementing an electronic storage of paper information that has a daily backup plan at a remote site and on-site. Two backups are always better than one backup.

An ideal system would be where any incoming documenation would be scanned into a system that will operate on quarterly system as opposed to annual storage.

This cut down the time to retrieve information and helps the company prepare for quarterly report in a faster turnaround time.

If your firm use expense and time report, scanning in via a barcode system is not efficient enough.  To eliminate fraud, it should go to an Audit department first, and the Audit team should simply approve or disapprove because they can catch fraud/disputes with field consultants before the company should paid out.

Then it should be released to the  Scanning Department where it sole responsibilities lies in scanning the expense and time report along with supporting receipts into a PDF system. Then the paper would get shredded. IRS law states a copy is required for audit purpose.  Check with your CPA and Tax lawyer and get the facts directly from the IRS in writing.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that some company treats expense reimbursement to employees as subject to employment tax and that is correct. Per the IRS, ”any Payments made by employers to reimburse employees for qualified business expenses are not treated as compensation subject to employment tax.”

One of the biggest problems that I have seen in a major corporation was time and expense reports with receipts being lost due to misplacement and lack of attention to details and lack of accountability on management’s behalf.   This is a problem that could have been avoided if the work flow process involved an electronic process of scanning the report itself.

Changing the work flow process would eliminate the needs for unaccounted for reports that were “checked” in but “disappeared” after the fact is truly uncalled for in a cost center.

The employee or client’s that need copies of the report for validation or verification would get it within the hour of request because, all we would need an employee id # and the cycle that they need report. A PDF copy would be mailed to the requestor.

The biggest culprit were certain key handlers were intentionally or unintentionally misplacing the reports and when they do this they in fact become corporate terrorist again it could be unintentionally or intentionally.

I recall one time when the team I was working on, a person whom was given the task of pulling reports was not paying attention and he “lost” the paperwork. Two other team members from the department went down to double check because the paperwork’s that team member misplaced were of a controller’ whom expenses were under review. This person’s lack of attention to detail caused an unnecessary delay and wasted of manpower time and cause unnecessary attention upon everyone in the department because everyone job was on the line.  To add insult, the person that found the paper just got a simple thank you but didn’t get a cash award for saving the entire team from getting fire.

Corporate terrorism is not a laughing matter especially when a person causes everyone job to be on the line then that person should been given a stern written warning placed in his personal folder.

All companies should treat personal information that are sensitive in nature just like the Department of Defense treat it information, highly classified and for your eyes only for certain people.

Cost Center is critical to the company bottom line, outsourcing the cost center is not an option because of the time difference and you get what you paid for. Going America is the way to go.

Finding a team that is loyal and is awarded quarterly is the best to minimize the risk of an employee going rogue on its company.

The bottom line, it was once said”loose lips sink ships”.

Loose documents and bad upper management’s mishandling of a big ass loan can sink a company, right BearingPoint?