US Treasury Mandates E-invoicing
Posted by
Pat Karpen on Thu, Nov 03, 2011 @ 11:10 AM
In support of President Obama’s “Campaign to Cut Waste” across the federal government, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced that it is mandating that all Treasury Bureaus implement the Internet Payment Platform (IPP), an electronic invoice processing solution, by the end of fiscal year 2012. Additionally, in fiscal year 2013, Treasury will require that its commercial vendors submit their invoices using IPP. This initiative will both improve
government efficiency and cut costs for taxpayers. Moreover, vendors who use IPP will collect quicker payments for their services, receive greater assurances that their invoices are received and processed accurately, and have immediate online access to their invoice status for all agencies using IPP.
Treasury estimates that adopting IPP across the federal government would reduce the cost of entering invoices and responding to invoice inquiries by as much as 50 percent or $450 million annually. These government-wide savings equal roughly one quarter of the $2.1 billion of the efficiency savings that the President’s 2012 Budget called upon agencies to identify.
“Electronic invoicing will mean lower costs for taxpayers and faster payments for private sector companies doing business with the federal government,” said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Neal Wolin. “Treasury is continuing to move forward to identify innovative ways to use technology to cut waste and improve efficiency.”
This action not only solidifies our AP automation solutions such as scanning, electronic workflow and OCR in the marketplace, but brings awareness to the North American market where we lag behind Europe in process automation, particularly AP automation processes. Interesting to me is the government projections of $450 million cost savings annually. I would like to learn more about these savings figures and the factors they used to calculate savings. Labor savings is usually a big component of the process. Do you think government layoffs are on the way?