ar Old Freisht Bills

unnoticed by both the shipper and carrier for years.

Through such recoveries some 250 freight bill audit firms acro*s the country are saving over 100 million dollars per year for shippers. With freight rates by most carriers having more than doubled since the war, shippers are more anxious than ever to seek savings. With many new items on the market, plus many other factors that increase rates, more than 100,000 new tariffs are issued each year by carriers.

In hopes of wringing some extra cash from their freight bills, about 80 percent of major industrial firms in the country send out their freight bills for audit. Many of the major companies with extensive traffic departments audit their freight bills first, and then send them to audit firms in hopes they will uncover errors that they themselves have missed.

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One enthusiastic subscriber, a large mail order house, states they would lose $150,0O0 per year ifit weren't for an outside audit. Even after a careful audit by its own staff, a large meat packer saves many thousands of dollars a year by an outside audit. Some firms even let out the actual audit of freight bills to the audit firms before payment of their freight bills. One of these firms is a large farm implement manufacturer in which overcharge recoveries have ranged from $85,000 to over $125,000 annually.

Frequently o'errots arise from the shipper's own wrong description of their goods." One firm was sending out its product as finished castings, at a rate of $4.85 cwt., while actually they were rough casting and entitled to a rate of $1.69 per hundred weight. The result was a saving of over $f00,000 for .several years. Even though freight bill audits save firms thousands of dollars per year, the freight auditors suggestions on cheaper rates, routings, methodg packing and so on can mean greater savings that can't be measured.

One freight bill audit firm {ound that a packinghouse product was misdescribed unknown to them or other packers, so they were paying 25 percent higher rates. The description was corrected and the saving amounted to $90 per carload, or $54,000 a year, for tlre group of shippers.

One eastern railroad official says one routing technie,ality noted by a rat€ expert coot the eastern railroads over one million dollars in refunds for overcharges on ship- ments of fresh meat from the Midwist to the Eastern Seaboard cities.

Some rates change so fast that the carriers can't keep up with them. One railroad lowered its rates on potatoes $l0O per car, but the shippers were billed at the higher rate until it was brought to their attention by the rate experts.

Sometimes it is the complexity of tarifis that make for overcharges, such as the technicality in tarifis called 'oaggregate of intermediate rates." Due to a rate adjustment it becomes cheaper for a shipper to move goods through a number of intermediate points than to ship directly from origin to destination on a so-called through rate. By revealing these rate irregularitie*,,'l rate analysts can save. shippers sizeable' sums.

Some rate structures are so trickv thaf -.. in one case on shipments of a certain. , commodity from Texas the carriors so dif-' i fered in their rates that with nine carriers r. participating in different routes they as. .r4 sessed nine different rates. and none was".i. right.

Another service that these freight bill audit firms perform is a pre-audit of the freight bills before they are paid. Thus they catch the overcharge on the freight bill immediately and prevent further over;' charges on future shipments.