Find money the AppZen way, with historical expense audits

Everyone wants to prevent occupational fraud in the future. Small incidents of misconduct today can be gateway drugs into larger, extremely-costly instances employee fraud tomorrow.

But what about the past? AppZen has recently helped several companies with historical audits, recouping millions of dollars they didn’t even know were lost.

Here’s how it works. A large commercial construction company in the Midwest came to us with a sneaking suspicion that it was leaking an unusually high amount of money via expense report misconduct, over the preceding 3 years.

They had little proof, just gut feelings and rumors. That’s when AppZen got to work.

Our automated historical audit works the same as the real-time audit does, only backdated. Much of our platform’s analysis centers on the AppZen Behavioral Index (ABI) which looks at employee expense conduct over time. In the case of historical audits, the start is simply moved back to a set time in the past, to look at how high-risk employees behaved even before they were identified.

The audit found several examples of past expense report misconduct at the company.

• One gentleman was routinely adding $80-$149 in tips on every single dinner receipt (right below the company’s limit), regardless of the bill total — presumably keeping the difference between what he actually paid and the much higher amount the company reimbursed him for.
• Frequent missing receipts (a quick and easy way to expense something you don’t want to show a receipt for) from several high-risk employees
• One employee submitted the same $3400 expense, twice
• While the company policy did state it would reimburse employees for traffic tickets related to work travel, the historical audit picked up numerous tickets submitted for times off the clock, with little or no documentation included,
• Alcohol expenses were reimbursed in government expenses, against government regulations.
• Several expensed merchants with opaque names that turned out to be gentleman’s clubs.

AppZen’s ability to audit expense reports in real time is well-established. This historical audit shows that the technology can also dive into to your historical books and locate past misconduct and find money, yielding a robust ROI and boosting compliance. Get started today.