Are your Employees Misusing the Corporate T&E Policy?

Do you think your employees are misrepresenting your expense process? Unfortunately, it is quite possible for employees to take advantage of the corporate T&E policy. Expense reimbursement fraud accounts for around 15 percent of business fraud. Even though there are many ways, employees can indulge in fraudulent activities mainly in two ways, they are:

Unnecessary business expenses

While on a business trip, employees may indulge in many activities that do not comply with business expense policy. For example, giving a tip and indulging in extracurricular activities comes under avoidable expenses. Generally, organizations don’t pay for all these expenses and employees should spend from their pockets. Hence, such expenses are not related to the business and should not be included in the expense reports. To prevent these from happening, you should list down and enforce certain policies such as what should be included in the business trip. Also, you should make your employees understand that these so that they will not include any additional expenses in their report. Managers should also be trained with regards to the expense approval process.

Overusing the company card

While company credit cards ensure that all the expenses fall within the T & E policy, there is a chance to abuse and use these in a number of ways. Make sure you check every single purchase before approving. The best way to avoid overuse of company card is to give your employees prepaid debit cards so that you set a spending budget for business trips and make your employees control their spending. In this way, you can avoid unnecessary expenses in business trips.

Tracking expenses all the time can be hard to handle. Business owners should think about major obstacles but not about employee overspending. Automated expense software is a great option that employees can consider to combat this problem.