1099 season is exhausting. Everyone has to file them and everyone has questions.

Over at The Accounts Payable Network, members have inundated our popular Ask the Expert feature with questions. These typically take the form of “we made a payment to X, do we have to report?” One issue that seems to be particularly tricky for AP departments is payments for medical services.

Happy New Year! This is the time of year when we evaluate our shortcomings and strive to improve. While this practice is usually associated with our personal lives, there is no reason why you can't apply it to working in accounts payable. AP organizations should always be looking for ways to work more efficiently and inexpensively.

While the overall spend that organizations put on their purchasing cards continues to grow every year, benchmark data shows that the growth is slowing. In addition, the percentage of organizations that have implemented p-card programs has remained essentially unchanged for the last two years.

However, this data is far from a sign that p-cards are on the way out. In fact, the opposite is true. P-cards are now a mainstay in a majority of accounts payable departments and the slowdown speaks more to the explosive growth seen during the past decade.

While paper invoices are still king, electronic invoices continue to make gains. Almost one-fourth of organizations currently receive some invoices electronically, with even more planning to implement e-invoicing systems during the next few years.

According The Accounts Payable Network’s Automation Benchmark Survey 2011 preliminary results, 24 percent of participants stated that they have implemented electronic invoicing. In a 2009 survey, just 10 percent had implemented the technology. The percentage of organizations receiving invoices electronically more than doubled in two years.

After spending two years transitioning to a new sales tax system, the residents of British Columbia are finally ready to embrace their Harmonized Sales Tax. Just kidding, they axed it.

British Columbia’s Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) has been in effect for just over a year. The tax, which combined the country’s 7 percent Provincial Sales Tax with Canada’s 5 percent Goods and Services Tax, has been widely unpopular since it was first announced more than two years ago.

Another year, another attempt at the Main Street Fairness Act.

With billions of dollars worth of sales tax going uncollected, legislators and big box retailers are once again joining forces to promote online sales tax collection.

Last week, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Representatives John Conyers of Michigan and Peter Welch of Vermont introduced the Main Street Fairness Act to both houses of Congress. The bill, which was also introduced last year but never voted on, would simplify – or overcomplicate – sales tax collection, depending on whom you talk to.

Anyone who frequents the News section of The Accounts Payable Channel knows that there is never a shortage of fraud stories. As long as there are opportunities to exploit weak financial internal controls, people are going to take advantage of them.

I've read quite a few fraud stories during the past few weeks. What makes these stories particularly interesting is that they show the wide range of positions fraudsters can hold in their organizations. A fraud perpetrator can be anyone from an executive with a six-figure salary to a small town government official.

The percentage of organizations that have implemented AP technology has increased during the past three years, indicating that most businesses see the benefits of automation. However, the percentage of companies identifying themselves as highly automated is still small.

In benchmarking surveys, The Accounts Payable Network routinely asks participants to indicate the level of automation they have achieved. TAPN first asked the question in a December 2008 study on invoices processed per FTE.

Last week’s catastrophic tornado outbreak stands as a stark reminder of why it’s important for all organizations to have a disaster recovery plan.

According to an article published by CNN, the tornadoes that tore through the Southeast April 27 and 28 were part of the second most deadly tornado outbreak in U.S. history. The official death toll is at 337. The storm also holds the record for the most tornadoes created in a single day, with at least 11 reported.

The European payments landscape has changed considerably in the last decade.

Regulation has enabled many companies to collapse individual country structures and transact their pan European banking operations in an increasingly efficient and cost effective manner.

The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) comprises the 27 EU member states, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. Three key factors in the last decade have opened up the SEPA zone enabling companies to consolidate their payment related activities with fewer banks, bank accounts and associated bank systems.