Nobody likes to think their own team would submit a fraudulent expense claim, and most employees never do. But occupational fraud researchers keep finding the same pattern year after year: it is rarely a single dramatic theft that costs a business the most. It is small, repeated claims that go unquestioned for months, sometimes years.
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates that organisations lose a median of 5% of revenue to fraud each year, and expense reimbursement schemes remain one of the most common ways employees exploit weak controls, precisely because they look so ordinary on paper.
That is the uncomfortable part. Expense fraud rarely looks like fraud while it is happening. It looks like a slightly generous mileage claim, a dinner receipt that is a little higher than the policy allows, a subscription that quietly became personal instead of business use.
Why Manual Review Misses So Much
Most finance teams already review expenses. The problem is what that review actually catches. A manager scanning a stack of claims at the end of the month is looking for anything that looks obviously wrong, not for a pattern that only becomes visible across several months of claims.
Duplicate receipts submitted weeks apart. A round number that appears suspiciously often. A claim that technically fits policy but sits right at the very top of every limit, every single time. These are the claims that slip through manual review, not because anyone is careless, but because spotting a pattern by eye across hundreds of claims a month is genuinely difficult.
The Cost of Waiting Until Audit Season
Many businesses only take a close look at expense data once a year, often when an external audit asks for it. By then, months of claims have already been paid out, and any pattern that existed has usually been lost in the volume of everything else that has happened since.
Catching an issue in an annual audit is better than not catching it at all, but it is the most expensive point in the process to find a problem. The claim has already been approved, paid, and reconciled. Undoing that, or even just having the conversation about it, is far harder after the fact.
What Better Control Actually Looks Like
The goal is not to treat every employee as a suspect. It is to make sure the review that already happens is actually capable of catching what manual eyes miss, without adding friction for the vast majority of claims that are completely legitimate.
That means checking every claim against policy automatically, flagging duplicates and anomalies as they are submitted, and giving finance visibility over spending patterns as they build, rather than after the fact.
Give every expense claim the same scrutiny.
Automated policy checks and anomaly detection mean legitimate claims move fast, and the ones that need a second look actually get one.
References
Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (2024) Occupational Fraud 2024: A Report to the Nations. Available at: https://www.acfe.com/report-to-the-nations/2024/ (Accessed: 27 July 2026).
