Controlling Expense Fraud: How Much of Your Revenue Would You Like to Keep?

Here’s an easy one: How many miles is it to the nearest neighboring city in your state? Okay. Now go ask a few officemates. 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 reports? What isn’t as simple to discern, however, is employees who aren’t merely making mistakes, but who are deliberately and fraudulently misrepresenting their expenses at your expense.

According to an Oversight Systems 2017 Spend Analysis Report, the typical organization loses 5% of annual revenues to fraud – 89% of which, according to a 2018 ACFE global study, are asset misappropriation which includes expense reimbursement schemes. And 50% of it all is due to weak internal controls.

So how do you rein it in? See the SAP Concur fraud tip sheet to cultivate a culture of compliance and protect your business with six smart tips:

1. Introduce robust policies for travel and expenses.
2. Provide tools that make it easier to be compliant.
3. Catch spend anomalies before they happen.
4. Reduce mileage padding.
5. Carry out audits to check adherence to your policies.
6. Monitor expense claim data automatically.

These tips and their associated tools will help you capture and control travel, expenses and invoices, with the ultimate goal, of course, being able to significantly reduce fraud.

You can’t control what you can’t see

Crystal clear, real-time visibility into who is spending, what they’re spending, and where it’s getting spent is another critical key to controlling fraud. And that’s the foundation of what SAP Concur delivers.

SAP Concur connects to spending data directly from suppliers, from credit providers and from virtually any other source, so no matter where or when your employees are spending, you can capture it all. And Concur Intelligence then puts that data to work, so you can:

• Give finance and business leaders detailed reports that track spending in key categories, spot higher-than-normal spending, and catch outliers and out-of-policy spending behavior.
• Give managers the tools to more effectively manage budget targets and control costs—using interactive, roles-based dashboards that give you a one-look window into what you’ve spent, where you spent it, what’s pending and where you stand on budget.
• Add custom or standard alerts that send real-time emails to managers when spending exceeds policies or monthly or quarterly budget thresholds are met.

Concur Intelligence is just one of a full arsenal of tools that help you control risk and compliance.

And that’s how you can start to get your 5% back.