Client Case Study
How WMA reviewed 799,142 transactions worth $9.4 billion to recover historical payment discrepancies for a global offshore drilling contractor – even one with an already well-managed Accounts Payable function.
$909,590.15
Total recovered
799,142
Transactions reviewed
$9.4bn
Audit value
56
Items recovered
The Challenge
eadrill’s Accounts Payable function spans multiple business entities and currencies, processing a huge volume of transactions across a seven-and-a-half-year period (January 2017 – June 2024). At that scale, even a well-controlled AP function will accumulate small, easily-missed discrepancies – duplicate payments, currency mismatches, unclaimed credit notes – that a standard audit sample would never catch.
Our Approach
- 100% review of approximately 799,142 transactions, totalling around $9.4 billion, across every business entity.
- A vendor circularisation exercise, writing to 1,700 suppliers to request open-item and aged-debtor reports – achieving responses from 844 vendors (a 49.6% response rate).
- Every potential claim validated against supporting documentation and payment history before being recovered.
- Full transparency throughout, with findings and recommendations reported back at every stage.
The Results
WMA recovered $909,590.15 across 56 items, spanning nine discrepancy categories. The largest were:
$437,216
Duplicate payments
48% of total
$186,973
Unclaimed credit notes
21% of total
$106,842
Historic deposits
12% of total
$71,621
Overpayments
8% of total
$55,780
VAT input errors
6% of total
Duplicate payments were driven by a familiar mix of causes at this scale: mis-keyed invoice numbers, the same supplier held across multiple vendor records for different sites or currencies, OCR software losing spacing in complex alphanumeric invoice numbers, and consolidated or batch invoices being paid both individually and as part of a schedule. Overpayments were largely currency-related – invoices settled in the wrong currency where a purchase order and invoice weren’t properly matched.
99.9932%
of transaction volume processed correctly
99.9904%
of transaction value processed correctly
Why It Matters
Seadrill’s AP function was, by any measure, extremely well managed – over 99.99% of transactions were processed correctly, both by volume and by value. Yet even at that level of accuracy, nearly 800,000 transactions still hid over $900,000 in recoverable discrepancies. That’s the case for a recovery audit in one number: it’s not a sign that something is wrong with your AP function, it’s a systematic check that nothing has slipped through, however good your controls already are.
