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June 2005
Failure to adequately
protect against the possibility of duplicate billing
by carriers and payment by shippers:
Carriers make every effort to avoid these sorts of
billing errors. Regardless of their best efforts,
this type of error is not unusual. Well designed
computerized freight payment systems have various
types of built in duplicate payment checks, but even
these are not perfect. A manual check for duplicates
is better than nothing, but not very much, if there
are a large number of bills being processed for
payment.
There continues to be duplicate payment bills
presented by carriers. Some of these are not a
deliberate effort to double-bill but occur because
of the manner in which the carrier’s particular
billing system is set up. For instance any
computerized program can be set up to check for
duplicate freight bills based on the PRO Number.
The computer can be set up to search for a set
historical period of time, and to throw out any
bills for manual review, which exceed the reasonable
search-back period of the program. But carriers may
automatically re-bill if payment has not been
received in 4-6 weeks or a couple of months,
depending on the payment credit arrangements. If
the bill is re-issued an identifying letter may be
added to the PRO number. The computer is not smart
enough to be able to read a carrier’s billing
procedures and will automatically treat the number
plus letter PRO as a new bill number and no
duplicate review will catch it as a duplicate. So
this bill will be paid! (A second time – or
sometimes more often than that!)
One other method of reducing the need for the
program to search through a tremendous bank of
historical data, is to set a time limit of beyond
which no bills will be paid if presented more than 6
or 12 months prior to final presentation. Special
handling can be given any legitimate bill that is
presented in this manner, providing it is not past
the statutory time limit for carrier billing.[1]
The responsible implementing group is primarily
Logistics with the others in the “Team Group C” with
design assistance provided by “Team Group B.”
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