Valuable Tips on How to Reduce Expense Fraud

As a company, if you’re not worried about expense fraud–then you should be. In fact, according to a study conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, expense reimbursement fraud makes up 15 percent of business fraud. Because of this, businesses suffer an average loss of $26,000 every year.

 

To make things worse, it takes around 24 months for any of the fraud to be detected. Therefore, before the problem and perpetrator are pinpointed, much of the company’s money has been used up for fraudulent purposes already.

Employees who commit expense fraud often say that they add additional expenses in their reports as a way to “even out” their previous reports. They may have forgotten to input some expenses previously and are making up for them now. It becomes a guessing game of inaccuracies and unaccounted adjustments. In the long run, this can unnecessarily cost the company a lot.

So how do you remedy this?

Remedy Expense Report Fraud by Taking These Steps

Let’s take a look at how companies can reduce expense fraud.

1. Track expenses much easier by requiring your employees to create one expense report per trip. Require them also to submit it as soon as they get back.
2. Make the most of every transaction and even get perks by getting your frequent travelers corporate credit cards. These can also allow you to more transparency for every transaction and get immediate credit for canceled ones.
3. Charge future-dated travel to a corporate charge card.
4. Establish a policy that requires most senior employees at a meal to pay the check. This helps avoid fraud, redundancy, and duplicate transactions.
5. Employees who submit hard-copy receipts and manually filled spreadsheets are more likely to commit fraud. Avoid this by creating steps to automate the expense reporting process.
6. Centralize travel expense processes for better management and visibility.
7. Validate expenses against corporate policy. This helps deter and prevent employees from entering a non-compliant expense. At the least, it creates a system that allows them to explain the charge for quick review and approval
8. Implement a solution that can automatically identify and flag different kinds of expense fraud.

Don’t Rely on Band-Aid Solutions for Expense Fraud

Remedying expense fraud doesn’t have to be tedious and time-consuming. Worrying about compliance should not give finance such a hard time that inefficiencies happen. Trying to police each and every expense item should not be done at the expense of company productivity. That’s why many automated solutions should be in place.

Gorilla Expense provides a comprehensive expense reporting solution that allows you to automate expense reports.

Gorilla Expense, for example, will identify any duplicate transaction the user may have entered by searching for similar transactions across the system. With our Receipt Scan solution, we also flag transactions on which the amount does not match the amount shown on the receipt automatically. The screenshot below shows how the system flags duplicates and transactions where receipt amount does not match the amount entered by the user.

 

In addition, our “Expense Policy Violation Reports” section will show you the top expense policy violaters in the company and also detail each violation.

With Gorilla Expense in place, you can be on top of all your expenses with better visibility, better compliance, significantly less fraudulent expenses, and much more peace of mind. At the same time, employees can find it easier to comply and submit expense reports. This helps get all the pain and hassle out of the way.

Find out how you can get Gorilla Expense for your company by contacting us today.