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Originally published in MetLife Record
Reprinted with permission

POAP Unit Pays...A Dividend!

Recently, the Purchase Order and Accounts Payable (POAP) Service Center in Rensselaer, NY, provided an unexpected boost to MetLife’s 1996 earnings.

This resulted from the recovery of a $300,000 duplicate payment that had been made to the United States Postal Service back in 1992 – a time before the Rensselaer unit was even on the MetLife Express (MLX) drawing board.

"Since the implementation of POAP in 1995, our responsibilities as the centralized bill paying unit for the Company are to do more than just cut processing costs," said POAP Director Liz Geddes. "We also are responsible for finding innovative ways to improve both service and controls. In this regard, one of several steps we took to enhance our controls in duplicate payment prevention and detection was to bring in the RECAP Corporation. RECAP specializes in finding and then helping recover duplicate payments, while at the same time recommending process changes to avoid repeat occurrences."

The Review

RECAP’s review showed MetLife’s current prevention and detection controls to be well above average compared to other large companies. Nonetheless, this $300,000 item that had been billed (twice) had escaped the original set of controls in place at that time.

Added Jeanette Cyphers of POAP, who coordinated MetLife’s dealings with RECAP: "the expense for any one client to reproduce RECAP’s knowledge base or automated duplicate detection programs would be a costly endeavor and therefore prohibitive. However, when those costs are spread across a large base of clients, a win-win situation results for RECAP and its individual clients, such as MetLife."

Proper Balance

Executive Vice-President Catherine Rein, Corporate Development and Services, observed, "This serves as an excellent example of the benefit of outsourcing in particular circumstances. With the POAP operation, we are keeping in-house those processes where we can provide high quality, timely and low cost services, but outsourcing those duties that are beyond the limit of what we can provide on a value-added basis. As this example shows, I believe we’ve struck the proper balance for POAP."

"POAP Unit Pays...A Dividend!" © 1996 Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.