Recovery Files: The Dating Service the Company Paid For

Not every finding is about fraud or recovered dollars. Sometimes AP analytics just hands you a window into what’s really happening inside a business, and every so often, what you see through that window is genuinely hilarious. This is one of those stories.

The engagement

We were hired to run AP analytics for a large, multi-billion-dollar manufacturer with both an SAP environment and a sizable purchasing-card program. Very normal work for us. Their main concern was duplicate payments: inside SAP, and across the seam between SAP and the PCard program, which is a classic blind spot.

What had spooked them into calling us was almost funny on its own. A supplier had phoned them to ask what to do about some double payments they’d received. When the vendor is the one telling you you’ve paid twice, leadership tends to get concerned in a hurry. So we came in.

We found real duplicate payments, the kind they’d hoped we’d find. But the finding that stole the show wasn’t a duplicate at all.

A code that didn’t belong

One of the reports we run flags questionable MCC codes. A quick primer: an MCC, or Merchant Category Code, is a four-digit code that Visa and Mastercard assign to every merchant to classify the type of business it is: restaurants, airlines, hardware stores, and so on. Every card transaction carries one, which makes them a fast way to spot spending that doesn’t fit the business.

One code jumped straight off the report: MCC 7273: Dating and Escort Services.

And it wasn’t a single stray transaction. It was hundreds of them, showing up as recurring monthly subscriptions.

This was a manufacturing client. There is no version of building industrial products that requires a dating-service subscription. In 25 years, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a legitimate business reason for that MCC at any client. So my first assumption was the obvious one: the data feed must be wrong. I went back and validated it. The feed was correct. The charges were real. Into the report it went.

The meeting

I was presenting the results, and the CFO was genuinely happy: we’d found duplicates worth real money. Toward the end, I brought up the dating-services charges almost as an aside, a weird anomaly worth a mention.

The CFO stopped me. “What?”

He wanted detail, immediately. So we drilled into exactly which cardholders were charging monthly dating-service subscriptions to the company. And that’s when someone in the room spoke up: “I know those names. I’m friends with one of them. Let me text him.” Because at that point, half the room still assumed it had to be a data glitch.

The reply came back, and I will never forget it. The VP of that division had been allowing dating-service charges to be expensed to the company, on the theory that if his people were happy in their personal lives, it would reflect positively on their work.

The entire room burst out laughing.

Why I tell this one

This story isn’t about recovered money or fraud. It’s about visibility, and that’s exactly the point. Most organizations have no idea what’s actually flowing through their AP and PCard data until someone looks at it the right way. Duplicate payments hide there. Personal purchases hide there. Waste hides there. And occasionally, a division-wide dating-services perk hides there too.

The value isn’t just catching the dramatic stuff. It’s finally seeing your spend clearly: every category, every pattern, every thing that doesn’t quite fit. When you can do that, the obvious problems and the absurd ones both come to the surface.

As for that division: after the meeting, the perk was over.

Curious what’s flowing through your AP and PCard data? Start a no-cost Proof of Value. We only get paid a percentage of what we recover.