Daily Archives: October 17, 2017

It’s Hard to Find Fraud in Big Spend Stacks …

Let’s start with T&E spend. While most organizations might believe that this spend, which is primarily for low value amounts on fairly well understood products and services, does not hide much in the way of fraud, that’s not always the case. Nor is the fraud limited to employees upgrading to business class, upgrading from rooms to suites, and spending a bit too much on drinks at the client dinner. (But even this can be very expensive. If this off-policy spend results in negotiated volume-based rebates failing to materialize, this can be very costly.) But that’s not the case. It cal also contain:

  • the same receipt for a $500 business entertainment submitted two (three, or even five) times, one month apart, on different claims and never noticed
  • a pet hosteling bill that looks just like a hotel bill
  • an invoice from Benny’s buddy Bob for 20% above market rates who drove him to the airport (instead of a licensed service at market rates)
  • that double billing by your no-longer favourite hotel for a room charged to your guest and then charged on your tab is really hard to spot (especially when some rooms were picked up and some rooms weren’t at your recent event)
  • collusion between an employee and a spouse who owns a travel “services” company can account for a lot of extra travel “services” billings that weren’t delivered
  • suppliers who know you have holes in your T&E monitoring can submit fake invoices for services never delivered
  • etc.

It’s really hard to find these low-impact fraud needles in a T&E haystack, but these needles can add up quickly — especially for products and services never even delivered! Only automated processing that can compare multiple entries across multiple dimensions and learn typical patterns can identify the majority of errant fraud that passes through your T&E system.

Moreover, as an organization learns to detect certain types of fraud, the fraudsters get smarter. No static system can keep up! AI based systems are key to an organization’s success.

In particular, AI-based systems that can work on multiple types of spend. T&E is just one category. There’s also invoice data for sourced and procured products and services that can be six to eight times the T&E volume in an average organization. And when we go broad, there are even more options for creative fraud from less-than-honourable parties. For example, you could see things like:

  • $4.95K shipping fees for $5 items because the tolerances in the system don’t kick anything up for review with shipping less than $5K
  • invoices from fake suppliers with the same name as your tendered suppliers with faked registry numbers and different bank information for payment
  • invoices from corporates owned by spouses of employees for services not delivered submitted by the employees and approved by colluding associates doing the same thing
  • etc.

For some of these instances, humans have almost zero chance of surfacing the infraction when its 1 invoice in 1000. A new solution is needed. A number of players are tackling the problem with modern AI solutions, but do the approaches have what it takes to find the gold in them there hills? Only time will tell.