Chrome River Business Expense Fraud Survey

Fool you once...well, it happens. Fool you twice, and like many organizations, you have a measurable and persistent issue with fraud. It most often occurs on a small scale, but repeatedly. And while the vast majority of employees consider themselves too honest or principled to submit inflated and illegitimate expenses, we found some revealing trends among the exceptions that might force you to rethink your strategy.

In a survey of frequent and semi-frequent business travelers, we discovered that among those who have never committed expense fraud, only four percent said it was because their organization's expense process make it difficult to get away with.

Travelers who submit expenses manually commit expense fraud at more than twice the rate of those who use automated expense software. The most common types are claiming extra mileage, adding personal purchases, or inflating tips. The amounts are usually small enough to go unnoticed – less than 50 dollars per expense report over two-thirds of the time – and the most common reason was to make up for other small expenses employees couldn't submit for reimbursement.

Less than 15% of of those who had submitted fraudulent expenses have been caught by an employer, more than three quarters of those self-reported transgressors have done so more than once in the last two years, and over a third of them are habitual perpetrators who had falsified expenses more than five times and have no intention of stopping.

Download the whitepaper and see if the findings match up with your organization's concerns about expense fraud vulnerability.