Oversight Blog

Our approach, and the approach that I believe is the next generation of business intelligence, is what I like to call the "Star Trek" approach. Even i...

Mike Kenealy, COO of Insiders Integrity, is involved in a project on the Philippines designed to take on ethics at the local level.  The project has f...

The Economist, in its May 9 article, “The anti-bribery business”, takes to task both the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and “FCPA Inc.”  The DOJ is cr...

Respondents to Business Travelers News 2015 Expense Manager Survey rated the importance of easing expense report preparation for employees a five on a...

The Financial Review article, “Business travellers use apps like Uber to escape bean counters - but the bosses are still watching” is a great example ...

Is it possible to have a truly global travel program? Business Travel News writers JoAnn DeLuna and Julie Sickel outline the objectives and challenges...

The indictment of Washington state auditor Troy X. Kelley is a case study in the inter-connected activities of an alleged fraudster. As we have discus...

For someone who happily resides in Georgia, the Dekalb County P-Card scandal with Commissioner Elaine Boyer hit very close to home. (Former DeKalb Cou...

Jonny Frank and Rex Homme do a nice job of succinctly addressing why transaction monitoring is the next “must have” anti-corruption tool (http://shar....

Sonny Carpenter, in his Criminal Justice article, “Avoid an Investigation: Automate FCPA Compliance”, makes one of the more succinct and clearly reaso...

I confess to having grown weary of companies in the data analysis and/or compliance business that scream tales of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (AKA, “...

Reconciling sales strategy with FCPA compliance seems like a difficult task, particularly in high-risk markets that offer the evil twins of big market...

Oversight had the opportunity to participate in the Concur Ignite 2015 sales kickoff last week in Bellevue, Washington. Concur is a strategic Oversigh...

TSYS recently collaborated with the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) Foundation on two surveys looking at the use of corporate T&E cards.  Th...

Christopher Bauer makes a quick and effective case for why companies can afford to boost their ethics, compliance, and accountability programs in his ...

Women’s Make Up Retailer, Avon, has been in the news recently for a large FCPA action against the company. The following article is an interesting rec...

President Ronald Reagan was using an old Russian proverb, in speaking to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev about an arms control treaty when he said ...

Predictions are traditional at the beginning of the year and the world of fraud and compliance is no different. In this tradition, ACFE Insights blog ...

The Thomson Reuters list of benefits from self-reporting FCPA compliance violations boils down to two very good reasons for self-disclosure: 1) cost s...

A new study from the GBTA Foundation, the education and research arm of the Global Business Travel Association, shows that while travel managers are p...

Recent problems at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Advanced Concepts Lab are represen...

Original expense receipt requirements are an old school approach to expense control.  In fact, I saw a recent list of the top five reasons why most co...

We don’t talk about the aspects of traveling much here on the blog, but today I wanted to comment on an interesting article on traveller friction. Man...

Football season is in full swing, and you’ve been living under a rock if you haven’t heard about the widely publicized scandal involving the Baltimore...

In this great blog by Syncsort, author Mary Hiers posits that there is a dearth of big data going to waste due to the fact that companies do not have ...

Expense management solutions are a necessary component of an effectively managed corporate travel program.  These solutions make it easy for companies...

It’s the beginning of the National Football League (NFL) season in the US and the Barclay’s Premier League (BPL) season in England.  At the beginning ...

John Lucker, Principal and Global Advanced Analytics and Modeling Leader at Deloitte, describes breakthrough analytics that transform strategy (and as...

It was with great interest that I read the results of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) recent survey on fraud as reported in Busine...

I recently read a great article from CIOonline about the need for a good relationship between the Chief Information Officer and Chief Marketing Office...

Douglas Merrill is spot on in his assessment of the “button effect” with data analysis; the “button effect” being the instance when someone becomes so...

In Rebekah Mintzer’s Corporate Counsel article, “Stepping Up Your FCPA Compliance Program”, she quotes experts who accurately point to the positive, a...

In case you missed it, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2010 against American Express that challenges the practices of Amex (and many cred...

I recently read an article on the Foreign Corrupt Practices act has become an industry unto itself, and I couldn’t agree more. With the exorbitant ris...

A few weeks ago, some of you may have heard about Facebook’s big user experiment, wherein they manipulated user posts to find out if exposure to emoti...

Forrester’s “The Power of Real-Time Insight” survey (done in conjunction with Oversight partner, Concur) is an interesting view of the realities of tr...

I have been following blogs by organizations that perform expense report auditing.  It’s a habit in my line of business, being the “software guy” who ...

Tom Fox suggests that “Blue Ocean Leadership” has implications for how Chief Compliance Officers (CCO) and other compliance practitioners can influenc...

Walmart has become the hot topic in anti-bribery and corruption/FCPA circles.  FCPA professionals, commentators, and other interested parties have com...

Marubeni Corporation’s second FCPA fine in two years is indicative that compliance is easier said than done. Over two years Marubeni has paid a total ...

What does an effective compliance program look like?  CEOs read this question and think about it from the perspective of, “What do we need to do to ma...

One of our customers calls T&E “the window into the soul of a company.”  Viewed from a corporate compliance perspective, particularly through a briber...

Donna Boehme gets it right when she says every company has the exact compliance program it wants (or deserves).  Donna is particularly critical of tho...

Pierre Mitchell and Tony Darugar provoke some serious thoughts.  They both observe that “expense management” should really be “spend management” and t...

Asking good questions, as Tom Fox observes in his April 10 blog, “Asking Questions to Build Your Compliance Program”, is the key to opening people to ...

In this infographic by The Beat, 45% of travel managers expect increases in Hotel cost over the next year. While hotels are just one component of the ...

The big news in the compliance world lately has been the enormous costs associated with FCPA probes and Investigation for Fortune 500 companies. First...

Back in March, Business Travel News unveiled their annual Corporate Travel Index. 2014 marked the 30th compilation of the average business traveler pe...

GBTA research has revealed that over half feel they have more control over their company’s hotel spending policy than they did a few years ago. While ...

In this article by Travel Weekly UK, a third of UK travel managers expect the number of business trips to increase in 2014. This of course means that ...

Below are my thoughts on the article "What You Don't Know Can Hurt You" by John Verver. For background, John Verver is a semi-retired senior executive...

Last week, Oversight Systems traveled to Palm Springs, California to participate in the NAPCP 15th Annual Commercial Card and Payment Conference.  The...

One of the biggest challenges in data analysis is in the acquisition of the data.  Once acquired, the second greatest challenge is mapping the data in...

I recently had the pleasure of reading Tom Fox’s blog, “The Alchemist of Comedy and Utility Industry Compliance”. In addition to a nod to the late Har...

With the close of fraud prevention month, Oversight wanted to recap our favorite fraud prevention tips. How many of our examples below apply to your o...

The GSA Travel Data Challenge is certainly “novel” as Jay Boehmer relates in his recent blog post on The Beat.

The cost impact of FCPA investigations is less related to fines and more related to internal investigations. These internal costs easily enter the ten...

In an insightful compliance-minded blog, Tom Fox recently discussed how conducting internal investigations can be a laudable best practice when it com...

As noted by Business Travel News, savings are a top travel management priority in 2014. This is no surprise. Since travel is the second-largest contro...

From articles like the one recently published in Buying Business Travel to the topics I hear buzzing in customer conversations, the common denominator...

Compliance Week recently analyzed the academic paper, “In Search of Effective Ethics & Compliance Programs,” published last month by University of Ten...

Concur’s CEO Steve Singh was recently featured in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC’s Mad Money. One of Cramer’s questions for Singh is related to ...

The BCBS of Western New York case study featured in Business Travel News is a nice example of realizing the benefits of “inspecting what is expected”....

Compliance as noted in the recent CFO article “Compliance Mountains to Climb” is interesting because it is a pass/fail endeavor. Either a company is c...

The author of the Paymnts.com article “The New Best Practices for Corporate Travel Spend” raises a great issue – company travel policy is not always f...

Concur recently shared advice on how to fix the “top 3 expense report budget burners” on its blog. In our customers’ experience, a fourth budget burne...

Could, as a Supply Management story notes, procurement fraud potentially be committed by anyone in an organization? In my experience, the answer is ye...

Travel Market Report recently covered a story on how many firms are slow to automate their business travel expense reports. Firms that are slower to a...

No one likes to feel like they’re owed money after a business trip, yet according to a recent survey, only 27 percent of corporate travelers indicated...

A survey of corporate travel buyers on combating fraud found, as reported in Business Travel News, that “the most common way corporate travel buyers s...

A recent article caught my attention in Spend Matters that advocates an approach toward spend analytics that goes beyond sourcing, and one that can be...

Our fourth in a series of tips for cutting T&E waste is focused on weekend and holiday purchases.

A recent piece in Travel Market Report notes this commentary from Harvard Business School visiting professor Thomas Davenport, Ph.D.: “For travel sell...

Our third in a series of tips for cutting T&E waste is focused on suspicious out-of-pocket expenses.

Our second in a series of tips for cutting T&E waste is focused on identifying and addressing misclassified expenses.

Did you know that T&E is probably your company’s second largest discretionary expense, representing as much as 6% of all corporate expenses? And that ...

I like to run. As I have grown older and slower over the last ten years, I have progressed from 5Ks and 10Ks to half-marathons and marathons. One thin...

A comprehensive and recommended report produced by Concur, the organization’s Concur Expense IQ Report, provides exclusive analysis of the T&E spend f...

We follow a lot of analysts, consultants, and vendors on topics related to data analysis and big data. Many discussions today focus on the shortage of...

I follow a number of LinkedIn groups that discuss data analysis and big data topics and find it interesting that these groups are mainly dominated by ...

A recent Buying Business Travel article noted how big data has become the buzz word of the year. More important than buzz, however, are the important ...