Post-Audit Service

"Post-audit service" is auditing freight bills for correctness subsequent to payment of the charges to the carriers. Truck, railroad or surface freight forwarder freight bills can be reviewed and any shipments which are found to have been overcharged will be the subject of an overcharge claim filed with the carrier involved.    Interstate shipments are subject to an 18 month statute of limitations. Intrastate (wholly within a single state) shipments are subject to varying statutes of limitations to as much as seven years. The States of Oregon and Washington have two year statutes of limitations. Air freight shipments by common air carriers or air freight forwarders may be subject to statutes of limitations from three months to three years depending upon the rules set by the individual air carrier companies. Transportation Contracts with carriers may also define this statute. Post-auditing is very worthwhile.    Besides recovering some of your freight expense with this service it can be an indicator of weakness in a carriers' rating/billing systems and in your verification, processing and payment system. Although this service is performed up to 18 months after billing of the shipments, the feedback information allowed on the post-audit reports should still have great value.    Post-auditing service is quite competitive between the dozen or so firms soliciting the service around the Northwest. They may all claim to be the "best" auditing service around, but there can be no real way to measure one against the other. They have differing areas and levels of expertise. One may do well for you one time and the next time another would be better.    It is probably best to find someone you are comfortable with and then communicate with them to determine where there may be areas of weakness or where the overcharging is coming from. You can then take some corrective action. You may find your auditing service not really willing to allow you feedback information. They may feel that to do so is to cut their own throat. They would just as soon have you and/or the carriers make the same old mistakes so they can file the same type of overcharge claims year after year. This is understandable since usually they are paid 50% of the recovered overcharges. Some will readily give you feedback information and others will not. We do...    I don't think that any one single audit person can be 100% accurate in auditing all of your shipments. This is impossible in todays transportation environment. Tariff publication methods have been somewhat relaxed or changed for common motor carriers since 1980 and with free or uncontestable entry for new common and contract carriers in the marketplace we have thousands of new carriers and tariffs or contract rate schedules with which to contend.    Post-auditing can be on an hourly or retainer fee basis as well as on a contingency basis. You have to decide which is best for you. You should consider that an auditor working by the hour or on a retainer may not have the same drive as the one rewarded on a contingency basis. You could consider that contingency based audit service doesn't cost you anything since it recovers already spent and accounted for funds.

Revised: 10-05-03....
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