Many back office professionals turn a willing blind eye to suspected expense report misconduct by employees. The cited rationale is that employees are getting away with “nickel and dime stuff” that isn’t worth the cost of attention.
But our platform, which has scanned several million expense reports, tells a very different story.
Only 18.34% of line items flagged by AppZen for scrutiny are for less than $20. This includes parking charges, tolls, and small gift cards — all oft-cited by in-house accounts as realms of malfeasance — that AppZen’s AI scans all day and night.
On the other hand, adding the two bars on the far right together, almost 43% of all flagged line items come in at more than $100. Furthermore, a line item flagged for potential misconduct is practically just as likely to be for more than $500 than it is for less than $20 (18.05% to 18.34%).
Our data also shows that AppZen historically flags around 10% (though that number goes down as we impact behavior) of line items for review across all audits. So if one of out ten submitted items is potentially fraudulent, and the average amount of each instance is almost $100 — that translates to millions in T&E leakage annually, especially for larger corporations.
