Contract Compliance

Our Contract Compliance team is part of HW Fisher’s successful Forensic practice. We leverage our forensic heritage and skillset to identify financial recoveries, process and contractual weaknesses as well as operational improvement opportunities for our clients.

We operate across a number of different industries with a particular specialism in Pharmaceuticals, Oil & Gas, Retail, Transportation & Logistics, Technology, Media & Telecommunications and Manufacturing and have developed a modern, technology-based approach to our audits that will be led by our skilled and experienced team. This enables us to interrogate and understand the most complex contracts and business relationships at a detailed level which not only helps identify recovery opportunities but also allows us to bring a greater level of contractual transparency for our clients.

We apply a commercial lens to our audits, and we have found that this enables us to provide additional advice to our clients including how existing contracts can be simplified, how the contracting process can be streamlined and how certain business practices can be modified to deliver additional value.

Why carry out contract audits?

We understand the relationships your business builds with key partners are critical and whether they are important suppliers, providers of outsourcing arrangements or alliance partners, the relevant contracts are key in defining the relationship, responsibilities, deliverables and compensation.

In many cases we see that these relationships can be dynamic and over time can outgrow the contractual arrangements that were originally put in place. This can lead to a contractual position that can be bureaucratic, cumbersome, inefficient and lacking transparency. A weakening of appropriate controls and monitoring mechanisms, when combined with this unnecessary complexity can create risks within your organisation and can lead to value leakage.

Embedding a structured and systematic Contract Compliance audit programme will provide you with the reassurance that your contractual arrangements are up to date, well managed and delivering maximum value for your organisation.

How HW Fisher’s Contract Compliance team can assist your organisation:

• Designing and implementing supplier compliance reviews and large-scale commercial assurance programmes tailored to the particular needs of your organisation.
• Identifying the key opportunities for contract compliance focus through a systematic review of the contract landscape and spend profile.
• Mapping out the in scope-contracts (and associated amendments) which govern the relationship with key suppliers, ensuring there is an audit clause present and that there are no other limitations to undertaking a review.
• Supporting the alignment for the commercial assurance programme with your key internal stakeholders.
• Performing testing on your supplier’s own data, scrutinising the invoicing process, as well as leveraging big data analysis capabilities. This enables testing all the way down to the individual line-item billing detail, as well as the associated source documents and back-up.
• Identifying any areas of contractual or performance non-compliance, quantifying any billing errors and factually confirming these with the supplier and third parties up front to ensure transparency.
• Assisting both parties in resolving any issues and agreeing on terms of settlement – either recommending a course of action or representing you in settlement discussions.
• At all times we will manage the audit and the relationship with your supplier in a professional and sensitive manner to maintain or even enhance relations between the parties.
• Recommending additional process improvement opportunities to course correct any non-compliance issues and achieve greater efficiency in contract management and delivery going forward.
• In addition, our detailed approach allows us to gain a fundamental understanding of the business relationship which invariably allows us to identify additional value adding opportunities that may or may not be contractual in nature.