Trick or Treat: Frights to Look out for in Your Corporate Spend

Watch out for the kids in costumes on the streets of your neighborhood tonight. It’s Halloween, the one night of the year for plenty of treats and a few tricks.

But for corporate finance leaders, tricksters are something to be feared every business day, not just once a year. Because they know that fraud, waste, and misuse are lurking in vendor payments, lying buried in purchase card transactions, and staying hidden in travel and entertainment expenses.

Here are at least four frights to watch out for in your corporate spend:

Phantom Dinners - Investment bankers at a leading financial institution treated themselves to meals on the company dime by forging receipts to alter timestamps so it would appear they were expensing meals ordered and delivered after hours. Many banks reimburse staffers if they order food while working late at the office on company deals and other projects. A dozen culprits paid a steep cost, facing either suspension or firing for their offense.

Zombie Vendors: An executive at a major tech giant submitted two phony invoices to his employer for payment, managing to embezzle $1.5 million from the company before the scheme was uncovered. The executive now faces wire fraud charges, which carry a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

Ghost Expenses: Employees can pass off a personal expense as a business expense. For example, an employee may expense gift cards as though a business gift or as an on-the-spot reward for employees, when they are really being converted to personal use by an employee, family, or friends. 

Vampire Mileage: Employees often pad their expense reports by claiming more miles for reimbursement using their personal vehicles on company business. Without an automated auditing and continuous monitoring solution like Oversight Insights On Demand in place, many companies are at risk of seeing cash leakage from this form of T&E misuse.

Learn how to be a fraud-fighting superhero in Oversight’s on-demand webinar, Leveraging AI and the Power of Patterns to Transform Your T&E Audit Process. We’ll show you how to put continuous monitoring and automated risk mitigation to work for your company to detect and stop fraud and waste in your T&E program.

With continuous monitoring and analysis of your spend data, our AI solutions detect patterns of risk and identify habitual offenders so you can take action. You’ll also know when to intervene with the 25% of employees who only need occasional policy reminders. Armed with complete visibility into your T&E spend, you’ll know exactly where to focus to mitigate risk, improve compliance, and prevent financial loss.

Let Oversight’s AI analyze your transactions and sort through the details to find the red flags. It will even prioritize them for you.