Credit for Disputed Voyager Card Transactions
Objective
The U.S. Postal Service joined the government-wide commercial fleet card program in January 2000 under the General Services Administration SmartPay Program. U.S. Bank is the contractor for the program, and Voyager Fleet Systems, Inc. operates as the card company. The Postal Service issues about 300,000 cards nationwide which can be used at more than 230,000 retail merchant locations in the U.S.
The Voyager card is used to pay for commercial fuel and oil, maintenance, repair, towing, shuttling, servicing, washing, and polishing of Postal Service-owned vehicles. It is accepted by most major oil companies.
U.S. Bank actively monitors Voyager card transactions to identify potential fraud based on criteria provided by the Postal Service, including: 1) gallons of fuel purchased exceeds the allowable maximum amount, 2) too many fuel purchases within a single month, or 3) duplicate transactions. Site managers reconcile high-risk transactions and dispute those that are not proper. U.S. Bank reviews the disputes, determines if a refund is necessary, and issues a credit to the Postal Service.
Our objective was to determine whether the Postal Service was properly credited for disputed Voyager card transactions.
What the OIG Found
Because the Postal Service does not have a process in place to reconcile credits from U.S. Bank to individual disputed transactions, we were not able to determine whether USPS was properly credited for all disputed transactions.
No one individual or group is responsible for tracking the resolution of disputes at a national level. The disputes are only tracked at the field level. When disputes are resolved, U.S. Bank sends an email notification to the employee in the field who submitted the dispute. However, employees in the field do not have the information necessary to reconcile disputes to amounts credited to the Postal Service.
From January through August 2017, 10,019 Voyager card transactions worth $1,152,177 were marked as disputed in the Fuel Asset Management System and were not reconciled to credits received from U.S. Bank.
As a result of our audit, the Postal Service requested that U.S. Bank revise its procedures. U.S. Bank plans to discontinue providing generic adjustments and, instead, include them as chargebacks on account statements to allow the Postal Service to tie specific credits to specific original transactions. Further, U.S. Bank identified internal system files that can potentially be used for reconciling fraudulent transactions.
What the OIG Recommended
We recommended management implement a process to reconcile, at least quarterly, all disputed transactions nationwide.