Contract compliance services help clients identify financial misreporting and reset the compliance baseline underpinning contractual relationships with business partners.
When it comes to third-party contracts, the rule of thumb is "trust, but verify." What's more, recovery of money is not the exception, it is the norm in most cases. Some organizations lose revenue, license fees, royalties, or pay higher amounts to partners than they should to third parties with which they have contractual arrangements. Contract Compliance Services (CCS) can help them recover those funds and improve internal processes to help ward off further losses and over-payments. In addition, other non-financial benefits can be achieved, such as process enhancement and improved relationships between business partners, among others.
CCS helps clients identify financial misreporting and reset the compliance baseline underpinning contractual relationships with business partners, which can result in potential collections or savings with significant return on investment (ROI). CCS can help increase the communication and understanding of contractual terms and obligations between the client and its business partner, leading to improved reporting processes and partner relationships.
Our specialized contract compliance services
Royalty reviews
We assist clients in the recovery of royalty revenues lost due to inaccurate and incomplete self-reporting by licensees. We also seek out the root causes of licensee underpayments and offer recommendations to help prevent future losses, while strengthening the underlying licensing relationships.
Distribution reviews
We assist clients in enforcing their contracts with channel partners to recover payments that may have been overlooked or misreported, and incentives that could have been inappropriately claimed. We also help clients develop compliance processes and systems to better address contractual obligations and prevent future revenue leakage, such as in the gray market
Supplier reviews
We assist clients in the management of their vendor relationships by assessing compliance with various provisions of purchase agreements across the supply chain such as Most-Favored Customer clauses; cost-plus or time-and-materials arrangements; outsourcing arrangements with manufacturing or ad agencies; conditional pricing arrangements; and rebates, discounts, and other conditional incentives
Ad agency reviews
We assist advertisers in assessing advertising agency compliance with contractual requirements to improve transparency within the advertiser / advertising agency relationship. Our assessments focus on addressing key contractual and industry risks to create an environment and trust and transparency between the parties while offering opportunities for contract and process enhancements based on industry leading practices.
Digital content reviews
We assist digital content owners in identifying and recovering uncaptured revenues. Our approach includes assessing the completeness and accuracy of self-reported data concerning the distribution of the client’s digital content from third parties such as online Web sites, mobile carriers and their respective service providers, and peer-to-peer networks. We focus on understanding and testing the end-to-end systems and processes, including those involved in data capture, sales reporting, and royalty and revenue share calculations
Most Favored Nations (MFN) reviews
We assist our clients with managing customer and supplier arrangements containing most favored nations (MFN) clauses. Our approach focuses on reviewing highly sensitive data (often under a non-disclosure agreement) that would otherwise be unavailable to our client. Our objective is to provide you the necessary comfort that your contractually preferred pricing measures are being adhered to.
Land lease & commercial lease reviews
We assist tenants and landlords in reviewing lease agreements to determine whether rent, common area maintenance (CAM) and any other costs are billed and paid accurately and on time. When representing tenants, we help ensure clients are not overpaying rent, CAM, and other billable costs under the lease. When representing landlords, we help ensure clients are not underbilling these amounts.
Participation reviews
We assist profit participants (e.g., film studios) in identifying unreported revenues, disallowed expenses, overreported distribution fees, and incorrect allocations of receipts. Our approach includes an extensive analysis of underlying revenue and cost data (e.g., revenue/vendor agreements, supporting invoices, evidence of payment) to assess the completeness and accuracy of self-reported amounts.
Business manager reviews
We assist high-profile individuals in conducting reviews of their business managers to assess financial, operational, and transparency risks of the relationship between the client and business manager. These reviews include an analysis of the business managers systems controls, internal processes, and reconciliations to supporting revenue and expense data. Our goal is to provide comfort to the client that the business manager has processes in place to protect and efficiently handle the client’s assets.
Concessionaire reviews
We assist property owners, venues, and organizations identify instances of noncompliance that can have a direct positive effect on the bottom line as well as lead to process improvements and strengthened relationships.
Contract manufacturing reviews
We assist our clients to test and review underlying costs charged to manufacturing agreements including FTE, material inputs, fixed overhead and variable overhead. We review the end to end processes for developing the contractual product and related charges for contractual allowability.
Collaboration & alliance reviews
We assist our clients with conducing reviews of third party alliances in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector. Alliance reviews may include reviewing a royalty, profit sharing or manufacturing & distribution arrangement with a collaborator or business partner. We focus on providing our clients comfort around the underlying accounting assumptions and accuracy of certain costs charged to the partnership agreements.
Industry focused approach
- Automotive
- Consumer & Retail
- Healthcare
- Media, Music and Entertainment
- Manufacturing
- Life Sciences
- Oil & Gas
- Technology and Telecommunications
