Case Study: Luminescent achieves detection and proof of years-long vendor overcharging at a Fortune 500 with Arbutus Software

Finding Fraud at a Fortune 500 Company

Luminescent, a Minneapolis-based forensic accounting firm, was brought in to investigate a large variance in a Fortune 500 company’s general ledger that suggested a vendor had been overcharging for years. Faced with millions of transactions across three systems (including Oracle and two proprietary systems), live-system evidentiary requirements, and complex procurement flows involving a third-party logistics provider, Luminescent needed a way to ingest, join and analyze massive, heterogeneous datasets without altering the source data—so they used Arbutus Software’s Arbutus Analyzer.

Using Arbutus Analyzer, Luminescent imported and normalized multiple file formats, joined transaction-level data across systems with read-only integrity, created virtual columns and used logging to document every analytic step; this enabled rapid profiling, matching and pattern detection across the complete dataset. The work identified the pricing variances, quantified the impact transaction by transaction, supported multi-million dollar recoveries to the Company, and produced evidence that led to the vendor CEO’s conviction and federal prison sentence — outcomes enabled by Arbutus Software’s Analyzer.

Luminescent

Matt Storlie

Data Analytics, Practice Leader