Agencies are preparing for revisions to an Office of Management and Budget circular that will require them to tighten internal financial controls. The revised Circular A-123 will take effect Oct. 1, the beginning of fiscal 2006.

One area of financial management ripe for better controls is the purchase card program. Using new technologies that allow tracking of card usage and more accurate data mining, agencies are becoming better equipped to spot unusual spending patterns and identify card abuse.

Agency officials issue the cards, which look and function like credit cards. Authorized employees use them for purchases of less than $2,500 and common goods such as office supplies or building materials. Agencies handle their own purchase card programs.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, is using technology from MasterCard called Aristion, said the EPA's Cheryl Upton, purchase card team leader. The agency gained access to the software tool last year after recompeting its purchase card contract and awarding it to Bank One, she said.

Upton said the EPA somewhat unwittingly became a pioneer. "Little did we know at the time that nobody has used Aristion in this manner," she said. "It was originally developed in Europe as a fraud-detection tool in the banking environment. It had not been used as an internal tool."

Upton led the agency to develop processes to use the software as an internal control tool, passing their developments over to the Aristion team at MasterCard, she said.

Aristion allows EPA personnel to comb their databases and extract spending information, she said. It can find expenditures in apparent violation of normal usage rules and thus in need of further investigation.

The EPA has 2,500 people involved in its purchase card program, including 1,900 users and 600 approving officials, Upton said. Very little fraud has been detected in the past decade, she said, and people who misuse the cards do not repeat the mistake after a warning.