Due to the increasing prevalence of wire payment fraud, University Treasury has instituted the industry best practice of requiring that bank account information for all wire transfers is verified with suppliers before processing the transactions. The primary risk for the university is email “spoofing”, where a unit receives an email that appears to be from the supplier and contains fraudulent bank account information. For example, an email with the wrong extension, e.g. john.doe@supplier.org instead of john.doe@supplier.com.

Treasury does not have relationships with suppliers and cannot independently verify the accuracy of bank account information. Each unit is responsible for contacting a known individual using a previously known phone number to verify the supplier’s bank account information. Do not attempt to contact the supplier by using a phone number contained in the same email as the banking information, unless that phone number was previously known for that supplier. 

A unit that submits a wire transfer request will be required to perform the appropriate due diligence to confirm that the information submitted is accurate and legitimate, and to attest to this upon submission of the request for payment. A unit that submits a wire transfer request will be required to perform the appropriate due diligence to confirm that the information submitted is accurate and legitimate, and to attest to this upon submission of the request for payment. As this attestation is a mandatory check box, as illustrated below, the system cannot process the wire form if this is not completed. Failure to select the mandatory check box will result in a failed requisition.

If you have any questions about the verification process, please contact treasury@finance.rutgers.edu

Posted 2/10/21