The Silent Drain in Your Supply Chain

📌How due diligence turns disputes into data and saves margins.

Vendor fraud rarely announces itself. It hides in paperwork that looks acceptable at a glance, in addresses no one physically checks, in sub-vendors few people know exist, until a dispute erupts and someone asks: “Who are we actually paying?”

Common patterns repeat across retail and logistics. Ghost staffing (employees billed but not deployed). Forged GST (numbers that exist, but don’t belong to that entity). Copy-paste addresses (multiple vendors tied to a single rented room). Undisclosed sub-vendors (work pushed downstream to fragile operators). Each pattern distorts cost, damages service quality, and creates legal exposure when something fails on the customer’s doorstep.

The fix isn’t more forms. The fix is verifiable evidence stitched together in one flow: corporate KYC from MCA and GST sources; site existence checks with geo-tagged photos and time stamps; beneficial ownership and litigation screens; SLA breach history surfaced before renewal. When this is bundled into onboarding — not appended after a problem — vendor fraud drops quickly.
What should a practical program include?

• Corporate identity & ownership: Pull MCA master data, map directors and past names; validate GSTIN, filing behavior, and registration status.
• Site existence & capacity: Do a documented on-site or virtual visit with geo-tagging and clear photos of signage, operations bays, and safety boards.
• People behind the people: Screen key account owners and supervisors for prior litigation that relates to fraud, theft, or misrepresentation.
• Sub-vendor declarations: Contractually require the disclosure of downstream partners and their basic KYC; tie payouts to disclosure.
• SLA & incident linkage: Don’t let disputes vanish. Link every ticket to the vendor case record; renewals should surface patterned breaches automatically.How fast can this scale? Faster than you think.
  With template-driven checklists and a central dashboard, you standardize onboarding without slowing it down. You get a visible trail of facts your finance, legal, and operations teams can defend later. You also compress the time it takes to terminate a non-compliant vendor and onboard a compliant one.
  The payoff is blunt: fewer invoice disputes, fewer chargebacks, fewer “lost parcel” mysteries. Most importantly, it restores confidence internally — managers stop firefighting symptoms and start fixing causes.
  Fraud lives in blind spots. Due diligence switches the lights on. If you want to see how your vendor file looks under that light, ask us for a quick gap scan of your top 20 partners.