T&E Fraud Linked to 5% of Travelers According to New Oversight Report

ATLANTA – September 23, 2014 – Oversight Systems, a leading operational analysis company, today announced the release of its first-ever analysis on the state of spending within T&E programs. The Spend Analysis Report: Volume 1, Fall 2014 provides findings based on an analysis of 10 million expense transactions from companies who utilize Oversight Insights On Demand™ for T&E to identify non-compliant spending.

Findings from the report include:

• 82% of fraudulent activities were committed by 5% of employees.
• Purchases outside of airfare, hotels, and car rentals are the hardest to control.
• 20% of travelers have at least one purchase on their expense report non-compliant with company policy
• 10% of travelers had at least one duplicate expense on their report.

“Many of our clients were surprised by the results of their own analysis,” said Oversight CEO, Patrick Taylor. “While the report reveals that fraud is not a rampant problem, there are still significant cost savings for those who address potential bad behaviors lurking in their own spending programs.”

The Oversight Spend Analysis Report highlights all instances of potentially hazardous traveler behavior that can arise in large corporate travel programs. In addition to reporting on the risks of fraud, the report explores other problems associated with waste and misuse such as duplicate submissions and suspicious out of pocket expenses. The report also provides relevant facts, percentages and examples to show how automated transaction analysis can save card programs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The analysis was performed on Oversight’s Insights On Demand™ platform, a web-based application designed to assist T&E, purchase card, and accounts payable programs in tracking company spending for policy violations, potential fraud and misuse, and compliance errors.  The software works by applying sophisticated forensic analytics, combined with transaction analysis to monitor 100% of the expense items. Insights On Demand offers users relevant insights based on their business objectives, and tailors the Insights to their policies and business requirements.

In July, Oversight announced the addition of Insights On Demand Spend Analysis, a dashboard portal that provides a comprehensive and visual view of total travel spend. Users can segment data by traveler, merchant, expense category, vendor or date, to take a closer look into the spending patterns and behaviors of employees. Based on the popularity of the dashboard, Oversight compiled the first-ever Spend Analysis Report to highlight behaviors prevalent across all corporate travel customers.

“We wanted to conduct an analysis that would show how expensive it is for companies to not monitor their expenses on an ongoing basis,” Taylor continued. “Our hope is that companies look at this report and begin asking questions of their own data.”

To view Oversight’s T&E Spend Analysis Report 2014, click here.