Pre-Audit Services

"Pre-audit" service is auditing the freight bills for correctness prior to payment to the carriers. Here the idea is to eliminate the freight overcharging in the first place by allowing payment only on the basis of the lowest applicable rate for your account. This minimizes payment of the overcharged freight bills and you don't have to go to the bother of filing overcharge claims for which you are at the carriers' mercy as to when or if they pay the claims.    Many carriers do not respond to overcharge claims at all. This practice is unlawful but they get away with it since there are too many violations for the understaffed regulatory agencies to handle due to the rapid growth in the number of new carriers. Pre-audit service is an effective way of dealing with such carriers.    Another thing favoring pre-auditing is that most carriers do not allow payment of interest on overcharge claim settlement. Some railroads pay a little interest but very few other carriers do so. Of course, we think they all should pay interest on their overcharges but the regulatory agencies have not been consistent on this in the past for any mode except rail.    The usual credit period of 15 days is plenty of time to allow the pre-auditing of freight bills. The credit period used to be 7 days and was enforceable per the carriers tariffs which has now been changed to be 15 to 30 days depending on individual carrier rules. Many yet may indicate their bills are due in 7 days but it should be no less than 15 days. The usual is 3 days to process through a pre-audit service allowing for one day mail time each way and one day for auditing.    With this service you are generally apprised of new situations and feedback from the auditor on on a more current and timely basis than with post-audit service. Charges for this service may be based on a percentage of the freight savings (usually 50%) or time or monthly basis.    Some firms providing pre-audit service on a contingency (percent of savings) may not be so willing to allow effective feedback. They must provide a copy with corrections noted and the tariff authority should be noted but they can still withhold information which would allow you to take corrective measures to circumvent overcharging on future shipments. We automatically give you full feedback information.

Revised: 10-05-03....
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