Collecting what patients and payers owe your practice should be a fairly straightforward endeavor. You provide a service and then you get paid for it. But we all know it's far more complicated than that-especially when receiving overpayments, or the distasteful idea of paying refunds, comes into play. Maintaining accurate, up-to-date patient accounts is critical to the business side of your practice. On the surface, it's a seemingly simple process of addition and subtraction. Yet many billers commonly spend a large portion of their time resolving accounts after patients have complained about a problem. Inaccurate accounts mean lost productivity. One incorrect entry can easily result in 20 to 30 minutes of extra work for the staff. If mistakes go uncorrected for too long, or become too serious, they may cost the practice a patient, or result in a complaint to the OIG to initiate a federal audit of the practice.  Our patients are becoming increasingly better informed on their insurances. Proper management of patient accounts requires the billing department to implement and follow strict bookkeeping procedures, including step-by-step protocols for: • dealing with each payment posting, adjustment, refund, and takeback situation, • authorizing refunds, and • separating tasks to avoid embezzlement. To comply with laws and payer contracts and your compliance plan, the following suggestions may help your practice. Overpayments, wrong payments - Overpayments may come in the form of receiving payment twice for the same service or receiving payment from both the patient and a carrier. Or a payment may simply come to you by mistake, for example, if the patient or physician in question is not part of your practice. If your practice receives an overpayment by indi…