UK Study: Travel and Entertainment Expenses Overcharged by £1 Billion

British corporations have wasted £1 billion in travel and entertainment expenses (roughly $2 billion USA dollars) last year by reimbursing either fraudulent expense claims (£350 million) or legitimate items that were not authorized by corporate policy, according to a new survey.

The comprehensive survey conducted in 2007 by Global­Expense, an expense management service, studied 4.8 million expense sheets submitted by more than 100,000 employees in 140 companies, representing 2% of the UK workforce.

Although 12 percent of the claims violated company policies, only 0.5 percent of such claims were rejected by the managers. A full 11% of all expense claims proved to be against corporate policies.

This underlines the urgent need for corporations to have multi-policy and multi-project T&E software that can flag individual expense items which violate specific policies assigned to specific projects.

It is estimated that 12 per cent of claims fell outside the guidelines but managers rejected only 0.5 per cent of them. These results corroborate similar findings of the Aberdeen Group survey conducted in October 2007.

"Companies are throwing away money by failing to check expense claims," is how David Vine, of Global­Expense, is quoted by the media.

Among the fraudulent claims are 20 copies of Bible and visits to strip joints, both filed as "client entertainment" expenses. A YouGov survey concluded that almost one in three British employees admitted fudging their expense reports for some extra cash.

The fraudulent paper receipts filed together with the expense claims included betting slips and aircraft fuel "bills".

T&E software that can accept faxed receipts directly, scan them electronically and then attach the security-tagged images to the individual expense reports would go a long way to catch, document and discourage such corrupt practices.

Visit the multi-policy T&E expense management software http://www.web2expense.com that requires no software or hardware. Try it free for 30 days to test its advanced anti-fraud features.