Top Tips for Tackling Fraud in Your Organisation
Are you one of the organisations having conversations about how to tackle fraud at the moment?
You might be one of the many organisations seeing increased levels of fraud. Oversight, an AI audit and risk management platform, reports a 292% increase in T&E violation rates since the start of the pandemic.
At the same time, it’s likely you have a renewed focus on business continuity and business growth, so controlling costs and reducing unnecessary spend is essential.
If you’re looking for strategies and tools to tackle fraud, take a look at our latest ebook – Taking the Driver’s Seat: Tips to Manage, Detect and Prevent Fraud and Bribery.
The ebook focuses on proactive prevention – stopping the problem before it materialises. It looks at the common areas for occupational fraud to take place, considers top tips for prevention and assesses how SAP Concur technology solutions can help you reduce the risk to your organisation.
Know the Fraudulent T&E Activities to Look Out For
Perhaps the most important factor in tackling fraud is understanding where the opportunities lie. Some of the most common areas include:
- Mileage padding. If employees log mileage manually rather than using GPS tracking, it’s difficult to validate mileage claims.
- Fake expenses. For example, an employee could submit an expense claim for breakfast for a small amount such as £10 without a receipt. But if breakfast was included in their nightly hotel rate, over the course of a week, this fraudulent travel expense will quickly add up.
- Duplicate payments. Two employees dining together could both get a receipt for the total bill and both claim the total amount, not the cost of their individual meal.
- Profitable per-diems. If you pay a per diem, employees can use a small portion of the allowance, claim the full amount and pocket the difference.
Tackle Accidental Fraud First
At the same time as being aware of common deceptions, it’s equally important to remember that the majority of occupational fraud is accidental rather than deliberate.
Sometimes, an employee simply didn’t realise that a policy had changed. Equally, sometimes, it was a genuine oversight they put through an Amazon receipt for home working equipment without removing the bestselling novel they ordered at the same time.
Yet 37% of claims have at least one exception, which includes waste and misuse, and 24% have at least two or more exceptions, so even spend made in error quickly mounts up.
To reduce the instances of accidental fraud you might consider:
- Implementing a corporate card system. When business travellers charge expenses directly to the company, they’re not accidentally entering incorrect numbers into their expense claims. There’s little room for error and you get far more detailed and accurate figures.
- Focusing on communication. Adopting a zero-tolerance policy and shining a light on fraudulent behaviour are some of the best things you can do to deter fraud.
- Assessing your systems. Manual T&E processes leave plenty of opportunity for mistakes (genuine or not) to happen. By implementing an integrated and automated spend management system, you’re equipped to set up proper audit rules, ensure spend is coded correctly and revisit policies and procedures so they work for you.
The Value of Automated Spend Management Systems in Tackling Occupational Fraud
When it comes to your systems, automation gives you the tools you need, especially in a climate where you are expected to do more with less. Even as far back as 2017, fraud examiners considered AI and ML to be essential tools for helping organisations spot fraudulent activity and patterns as well as see policy grey areas that need to be tightened up to stop accidentally non-compliant spend.
Best-in-class tools such as SAP Concur solutions combine the power of AI and ML with human intelligence to help organisations enhance T&E processes. They deliver the compliance benefits of data transparency. They also offer a wealth of add-on tools to help you boost compliance even further.
Find Out More
To find out more about the strategies and tools you can use to tackle fraud in your organisation, download the ebook Taking the Driver’s Seat: Tips to Manage, Detect and Prevent Fraud and Bribery
