Forensic expense recovery & audit specialists

We turn knowledge into profit
for the people who run America.

Cities, counties, school districts, hospitals and the country's largest enterprises rely on AER & AUA to recover what's been overpaid — on telecom, fuel, energy and tax. Twenty-seven years. Zero risk. Pure contingency.

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Trusted by state agencies, counties, universities & enterprises
What we recover

Four practices.
One contingency engagement.

Every invoice your organization pays carries hidden errors — in rates, taxes, surcharges, and provisioning. We find them, recover them, and lock in lasting savings.

01

Forensic IT & Telecom

Line-by-line audit of every circuit, line and contract. We recover refunds, lock in lower rates, and clean up a decade of carrier billing errors.

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02

Fuel expense recovery

Up to $0.60 of every gallon is tax. We pursue federal, state and county refunds for fleets, off-road, PTO, refrigerated and exempt operations.

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03

Energy expense recovery

Retail-to-wholesale graduation, benchmarking, and demand management for qualified electricity and natural gas accounts.

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04

Tax expense recovery

Sales, use, surcharge and regulatory-fee audits. Most clients silently overpay 1–3% of invoiced spend — we recover it.

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State · County · Municipality

Built for public-sector
procurement.

Cities, counties, school districts, universities and state agencies trust AER & AUA to deliver utility, telecom, fuel and tax recovery audits on a 100% contingency basis — structured for procurement, designed for audit committees.

How we work

A four-phase methodology.
Five months. No disruption.

Documented SLAs, transparent dashboards, and continuous reporting at every stage — built for audit committees, city councils and finance leadership.

1

Discovery

Document gathering, LOAs, location lists. 2 weeks.

2

Inventory

Standardize every invoice into one auditable database. 3 weeks.

3

Audit, Review, Approve & Recover

Forensic line-by-line review & refund filing. 4 weeks.

4

Implement

Execute orders, verify after-bills, lock in savings. 2–3 months.

Who we are

A small team.
A long memory.

Twenty-seven years of recovery data, every dollar tracked. We know exactly which spend categories return the most — and we go straight there.

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Jim Barbee

President

27+ years of large-government and private-sector expense recovery. Substantial recoveries delivered across federal, state and local agencies, school districts, universities and Fortune 1000 enterprises.

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Mitch Uehling

Senior Analyst · Recovery

Lead analyst for the energy practice and team procurement. Five years of public- and private-sector refund recovery work.

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Ken Atkinson

Senior Analyst · Fuel & Energy

Decades of relationships in fuel, energy and government procurement. Brought AER more than twenty of the largest U.S. construction firms with significant first-year recoveries.

Find what you've been overpaying.

We'll tell you what we'd recover before you ever sign anything. Zero cost, zero risk, zero obligation.

✓ No upfront fees ✓ No retainers ✓ No recovery, no charge