For many organizations, travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses are an area of high risk of exposure to costly abuse, misuse and fraud. Controls within this business process are often manual, or a matter of policy.
Not surprisingly, loopholes of fraud opportunities abound throughout business processes. Our customers, for example, have discovered all sorts of “interesting” violations. Like staff using corporate credit cards to buy groceries, tarot card readings and…cattle (not kidding). And several customers who have discovered staff submitting T&E expenses claims for business travel that was not taken. One university customer even found a staff member lining his pockets using his printer and scanner. The receipts he was submitting were real…but he carefully altered the value of each purchase by pasting in an inflated number, and then pocketed the difference.
It turns out that it’s quite easy to make a fake receipt—like the one to the right that I made using the very first link in the online search results for “fake receipt maker”.
“Well, that’s easy to catch,” you might be thinking of my old school fraud project. “Our Benford’s Law test would spot the fake totals, so my work is done.” Not so fast. Have you ever tried searching “Benford’s Law number generator”? Where there’s a will, there’s an app.
Fortunately, our customers worked their CSI skills by applying various data analysis tests and were able to uncover such death-by-a-thousand cuts frauds and recover their losses. Our customers do the creative thinking, tell the analytic engine what to look for, and then get onto other valuable work while the ACL engine scours the data and alerts them to potential violators.
How can data analytics help you meet the challenges inherent in managing T&E expense processing?
(Source: ACL Blog)
