In-house fraud in travel expenses amounts to 700 euros per employee per year

Internal fraud per employee amounts to around 700 euros per year, 3.27% less than in the previous year, according to a report by Captio. The most common cases are passing on old expenses, justifying several expenses with the same receipt and exceeding the maximum amount authorized by the company.

The report “Scope of Internal Fraud in Expense Management in Europe”, prepared by Captio, analyzes 1.8 million expenses of 9,994 workers from 130 European companies.

In absolute terms, the impact of this type of cheating amounts to 53.772 euros per year on average per company, and to 699 euros per worker, a figure that represents a decrease of 3.27% compared to the previous year (723 euros).

Passing old expenses, justifying the same ticket several times or exceeding the amount maximum authorized are some of the most common irregularities in business travel.The analysis shows that 15% of the expenses of small and medium-sized companies are allegedly fraudulent, an increase of 3% and 1%, respectively, compared to the results obtained last year. In large companies, however, fraud is down from 14% to 10%.

  “irregularities in management“n seriously reduce the competitiveness of companies  “as and hinder decision-making due to the distortion of available data”, says Joaquim Segura, CRO and co-founder of Captio. The worsening of the work climate and damage to corporate reputation are other consequences of these bad practices.The use of software to automate and digitize expense management and the implementation of a regulatory framework that defines what is fraud, establishes the different degrees of fraud, and establishes the different levels of fraud; is fraud, establishes the different degrees of seriousness and sets the measures to be taken” is essential to minimize internal fraud”, Segura explains.The study also shows that companies allocate resources to detect different types of fraudsters depending on their needs and their specific characteristics. Thus, 83% of the analyzed companies have established controls to detect duplicate tickets, 69% check the existence of weekend expenses and 66% monitor compliance with the maximum authorized limits per expense.