Controlling Expense Fraud: How Do You Promote Compliance to Protect Your Business?

Can you answer this without using the internet – how many miles is it between London and Manchester? Now go and ask a few colleagues. Odds are, your answers will all be different, and none of you will be right.

See how easy it is for people to make honest mistakes on their expense claims, especially mileage? What isn’t as simple to separate, however, is employees who aren’t merely making mistakes, but who are deliberately and fraudulently misrepresenting their expenses. And at your expense.

Regardless of your organisation’s industry, size, or location, mistakes or fraud in your travel and expense spend can have significant financial consequences. Fraud isn’t something that many organisations want to acknowledge or talk about. Unfortunately, it is an undeniable issue in every organisation. Every day that duplicate, exaggerated or fake payments are being processed, your business is losing money.

Your employees may think a little exaggeration on expense claims “here and there” may not be a big deal, but when you’re managing hundreds or thousands of employees, you know that a little exaggeration can soon add up.

What can you do to promote compliance and reduce financial risk? Here are three ways to help you start:

1. Introduce robust policies for travel and expenses: Establish clear spend guidelines for what is and isn’t acceptable and communicate these rules to your employees.
    
2. Provide tools that make it easier to be compliant: Make it simpler and more convenient by offering mobile apps that allow employees to submit, review, and approve spend quickly and accurately using their smartphones.
    
3. Monitor expense claim data automatically: Aggregate spend data across multiple channels, and use custom reports and dashboards to spot issues, as well as identify trends, and prioritise auditing resources.

Download this eBook for more ways to get control over compliance and effectively manage travel and expense spend.