If not you should. An accounts payable professional recently wrote asking about a feature that causes some confusion. It was the request for what looked like personal information. Here’s my response.

Excerpted from the January 2010 issue of Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow.

Paper checks are costly, inefficient, and a huge headaches for those toiling away in accounts payable. Yet they remain the tool used to pay the majority of invoices, even at many organizations with the ability to pay electronically. To change this situation, it may be necessary to go on the offensive and find ways to grow your ACH program. It’s certainly worth the effort, given the nuisance of paper checks. What follows are seven assertive techniques to grow an ACH program be it one that is languishing or one that’s thriving but could use a little extra oomph.

Don’t overlook your Web site. Publish ACH information on the company Web site. Occasionally a vendor you might not have approached will want to participate. Make it easy. Also, if you are going to take this approach, include your vendor enrollment form on the site. Do this only if you are willing to include all vendors in the program. Otherwise, you may find your p-card vendors signing up for the program—and there goes your rebate.

The rest of this article, along with articles on: bank account takeovers that lead to unrecoverable transactions, AP New Year’s resolutions and how to keep them, 1099K (a new proposed IRS form), the Procurement/Finance Gap (an excerpt from a fine Baseware white paper), a naming convention check list you can use for your master vendor file, a look at recovery audits, and a overview of advanced 1099 issues for W-9s, are all in the January issue of Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow. Of course, the issue also includes two pages of tips and strategies you can use to fine-tune your AP process.

You can purchase the single issue using the link below or subscribe for one or two years and receive our quarterly podcasts as part of that subscription.

Purchase an electronic copy of the January 2010 issue of AP Now newsletter.

(c) 2010 Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow and CRYSTALLUS, Inc.

Let’s start with T&E – one of the areas the IRS has announced it will focus on for extra special attention in its audits this year. To be perfectly honest, along with the rest of the accounts payable world, I was flabbergasted when I heard T&E had made the IRS hit list. But in hindsight, we shouldn’t be surprised. There have been, at least to my way of thinking, two major shifts in the way the corporate world views T&E expenditures. While there have always been organizations that took T&E seriously, many refused to enforce the policy uniformly allowing “special” employees to spend outside the policy. Here, we’ve always taken the view that this was totally unacceptable.

The enactment of the Sarbanes Oxley Act was the first wakeup call. This was documented in an Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow survey where 57% of the respondents reported tightening up their policy as a result of the Act, although only 30% of the respondents were from public companies.

The second death knell to lackadaisical T&E enforcement came, I believe, as a result of the cratering economy. Within the last 18 months, we started to hear much discussion about “zero tolerance policies” something that was never mentioned in the past. A growing number of companies no longer have a sense of humor about inappropriate T&E expenditures. Step over the line and you may find yourself pounding the pavement.

And, now the IRS is stepping up auditing in this arena. It’s as though a new moon is rising. If you have not taken a close look at your T&E policy in recent times, now would be a good time to do so. It would also be appropriate to review the IRS guidelines to ensure your organization is complying with them. That is just one of the topics that we’ll review and discuss in our Sept. 23 webinar on T&E Best Practices to Ensure Compliance with IRS Regs and Prevent Fraud.

For additional information or to register for the T&E webinar/CD

 Did you know that the IRS has guidelines on when employees have to account for their business expenses and how quickly cash advances must be returned? What I like about these rules is they allow the manager responsible for travel and entertainment reimbursements to use the IRS to get people to hand in their expense reports on a timelier basis. How often do you get the IRS to do your dirty work for you?

We’ll talk about the IRS rules along with other best practices techniques you can use in your T&E operation to run a tighter ship and conform to IRS guidelines. We’ll also have some T&E fraud stories, with advice on how you can prevent T&E fraud in your shop.

T&E Best Practices to Ensure Compliance with IRS Regs and Prevent Fraud webinar

The cell phone bill, as those accounts payable professionals whose companies give cell phones to employees, is a nightmare to administer - both from an operational standpoint and tax view.

As you may know, the minutes are supposed to be allocated between personal and business use and then income tax paid by the employee on the value of the personal use. The employer is supposed to add the value to the employee’s W-2. 

There’s been a lot of outcry on this and the new administration is looking at amending the law. One proposal floated earlier this week involved a uniform 25% being allocated to personal use by everyone. This led to an outcry led by some of the telecoms.

Now, it looks like that may fade - although nothing has been decided yet. Check back and we’ll update you as we follow this issue - or sign up for our ezine where we keep our readers abreast of payment issues such as this.

(c) 2009 Accounts Payable Now & Tomorrow

A reader wrote: How does one go about auditing cell phone use?  We currently don’t do an audit and can’t figure out how to do one.  Even if the employee keeps a detailed record of their business and personal calls, how do we know that the person they indicated is “business” is actually “business” and not “personal”? Any help is greatly appreciated.

All I could think is UGGGHHHH! Tracking minutes on a $49 bill - they have GOT to be kidding! But, I knew the IRS wasn’t. Do they ever? When we wrote about this in our ezine (click here to sign up) several readers wrote in with their solutions as well as a regulatory update (cross your fingers and start praying).

David Farrell, a CPA with the City of Boulder provided us with the following info.

Several groups including the AIPCA and GFOA are working with Congress to eliminate cell phones as ‘listed property’.  H.R. 5719, the “Taxpayer Assistance and Simplification Act of 2008,” was passed by the House on April 15.  The cell phone provision of H.R. 5719 would remove cell phones and similar telecommunications equipment from the definition of “listed property” in the Internal Revenue Code.  “Technology and business practices have changed significantly since cell phones were first introduced and required to be treated as “listed property,” Ochsenschlager AICPA vice president for taxation said.  “It’s time to lift these burdensome rules off taxpayers.”

Here’s some additional information from the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) website: The GFOA, the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers and Treasurers, and other state and local government groups are working with members of Congress and a state and local government advisory group to help the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) better understand the problems governments face with personal and professional cell phone record keeping associated with government-provided phones or PDAs. The current IRS regulations, written in 1989 when most cell phone calls were charged by the minute, mandate that governments (and all employers) track and charge the employee for all personal calls made on employer-provided phones, or alternatively, charge employees the full value of the devices. With the significant enhancements in technology and pricing of phone services, itemizing personal calls has become a nearly impossible task.

Another reader graciously offered the following website for those interested in tracking the legislative process.

http://www.rcrnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080216/SUB/424338990&SearchID=73309866665221

Well, now all we can do is pray that the Senate and the President don’t let us down - and against the odds, I am resisting the temptation to comment on that!