We have a DDA in house account with authorized signatures of two bank personnel and an individual representing the insurance company. When our employees have an out of pocket expense they fax a copy of their bill to the insurance company. The company in turn issues a check payable to the employee. Does anyone have an account such as this and how is it handled/reconciled?

I failed to mention there are two DDA accounts set up this way. One as above mentioned and the second one is for purpose of issuing checks payable to doctors, hospitals, etc.

No one is handling their insurance this way?

Our HRA is handled by the insurance company issuing one of their checks to the employee and then the bank reimburses the insurance company but it is done with an ACH debit.

Is this what you are talking about?

No. We have a DDA account that the insurance company signs on and they issue a check payable to the employee and also checks are issued to the doctors, hospitals, etc. Our bank in turn credits the DDA account as needed with a debit to the respective GL expense account. My concern is do you just assume that all checks are legitimate? Where's the "checks and balances"?

Are there supporting documents such as invoices that you could trace the checks back to?

One of the DDA accounts is used to reimburse our employees for their out of pocket expenses when they have a "Cafeteria Plan". The employee turns in their invoices directly to the insurance company and the insurance company issued a check drawn on our DDA account to reimburse the employee. I'm thinking we need to require the employees make copies of the invoices so they can be matched up against the checks written. The other DDA account is used for the insurance company to issue checks to pay the dr.,hospitals, etc. We have absolutely no invoices or documentation whatsoever.

Make sure that you are not violating any HIPAA rules by requiring employees to submit copies to bank personnel.

we do ours like this, sort of. The ins co owns the account and our money along with the money of other employers is in that account. NO bank empoyee signs checks. It happens to be at our bank, though. We fund our employees flex contributions to it via ACH. Employees send reimbursement requests to the ins co. We don't see anything from or about the employee. We rely on the ins co to have audits in place. We get a SAS 70 annually.