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I found out about a worker getting fired because of this at one of the big 4 consulting firms. They used SAP Concur[0] software for travel & expense management

by jasode 8y ago

I found out about a worker getting fired because of this at one of the big 4 consulting firms. They used SAP Concur[0] software for travel & expense management and the machine learning algorithm flagged an irregularity in a recent expense reimbursement. But she wasn't actually fired for that one bad expense. What happened was that the SAP Concur raised management's suspicions which prompted the human accountants to go back into the old archives of T&E submissions from 5 years ago before SAP Concur was installed. They manually looked at her past reimbursements and discovered a long history of fraudulent claims. (E.g. incorrect hotel amounts.) After the investigation, she was promptly fired without severance and also lost her flexible medical benefits (worth at least $10k). Fraudulent expenses are no joke. Consulting companies are very sensitive about it because many consultants' expenses are included in the invoices and directly passed onto the clients. If you let clients discover a fraudulent expense instead of your internal auditing team finding it first, it is extremely embarrassing and taints all your other invoices. Integrity has to be maintained and you don't want clients questioning all the other billable hours and expenses. [0] https://www.concur.com/ https://www.concur.com/

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
A lot of expense procedures are fuzzy for a reason (no experiences with consulting companies). Fraudulent expenses are the first and easiest way on the manager level / c-level to check if you want to get rid of someone. If everything is ok you need to look somewhere else.
davio 8y ago
There was the old "raincoat expense report" urban legend back when I was in Big 4. Consultant left raincoat on subway while traveling for business and ran replacement cost through on expense report. Admin rejected the expense. Consultant submitted second expense report with exact same total without the raincoat expense line item and the cost just absorbed into the other untraceable per diem and incidental categories. "Find the raincoat now" as a comment.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  Interesting story. :) I think businesses can he really hard on fraud without being hard on what constitutes a valid expense.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    I wonder how expensive that raincoat was that the person thought it needed to be its own line item on the expense. That's normally what the incidental expenses line is for, so this is just a story of someone who filled out his expense report incorrectly, got it rejected, and then filled it out correctly.
    - deepGem 8y ago
      A good raincoat is pretty expensive. At least $200. So the guy submits an expense report with a $200 line item, gets rejected and splits the $200 into probably 7 or 8 incidentals which usually have a $25 limit, probably on different expense reports.
      - jandrese 8y ago
        I'd take a double take at a $200 line item for an emergency raincoat to replace one that I lost on a trip. I'm not asking the guy to get a plastic poncho for his business meeting, but he doesn't need to get it at the Gucchi store.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Reminds me of a time I worked in a company that reimbursed us for coffee expenses on business travels. In their system, I had to itemize every receipt, so my expense report ended up being 50% made of morning espressos. The secretary handling expenses came back to me pretty annoyed and told me that next time, I should buy a pre-paid Starbucks card instead.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  Similar experience at an employer where I was grateful to be travelling on their dime. Took the bus and metro home from the airport - $3 claim rejected because I didn’t get a transfer as proof (which wasn’t needed to ride on this trip). Yet if I drove, I could have claimed 50 cents a km or something, no proof required.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> incorrect hotel amounts What does this mean?
- asaph 8y ago
  Amount claimed on expense report != amount paid to hotel.
dv_dt 8y ago
Wait, why should she lose her flexible medical benefits? Shouldn't recovery of the expense fraud be a separate legal process from taking of personal medical accounts? Why do we connect medical benefits to employers?
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Good question. It's a very strange method of motivation or coercion that we've all just kind of accepted into our lives, and we feel lucky to even have that. Well all of us in the US, anyway. For some reason it doesn't work that way in most places on earth. Medical job-lock is a real thing that happens, and most of us just discount the possibility completely until an unexpected problem crops up. AMHIK. Everyone be grateful for your health while you can, and plan for the future.
- jasode 8y ago
  >Wait, why should she lose her flexible medical benefits? Because it was one of those "healthcare savings flex accounts" where the company puts in "virtual dollars" to pay for some types of health care. Unlike unused vacation days that requires payout on the last paycheck by law, or a 401k account, this type of "flex account" is really a convenient accounting category that's administered purely by corporate discretion. If the employee gets fired for just cause, the company decided it didn't want to let him/her walk away with the flex account. For the retirees that left on good terms, they do. It's just the way they did things. I think the idea is that the the ex-employee is now viewed as a criminal so the company feels justified in withdrawing discretionary benefits. The regular type of employee health insurance that one could extend with Obamacare or COBRA was a separate thing. (Ninja edit to reply below: it was not an FSA or "cafeteria" plan that deducted real dollars from the employee's paycheck. It was literally "virtual dollars" that the company allocated to the employee. But the virtual money turned into real money when the retiree used it to pay Medicare premiums. If there's an industry-wide jargon for this type of virtual bank account for healthcare that the employee never directly contributed to, I don't know what it is.)
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    Maybe you're talking about a different kind of account, but FSA dollars come out of the employee's own paycheck.

by jasode 8y ago

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

A lot of expense procedures are fuzzy for a reason (no experiences with consulting companies). Fraudulent expenses are the first and easiest way on the manager level / c-level to check if you want to get rid of someone. If everything is ok you need to look somewhere else.

davio 8y ago

There was the old "raincoat expense report" urban legend back when I was in Big 4. Consultant left raincoat on subway while traveling for business and ran replacement cost through on expense report. Admin rejected the expense. Consultant submitted second expense report with exact same total without the raincoat expense line item and the cost just absorbed into the other untraceable per diem and incidental categories. "Find the raincoat now" as a comment.

Waterluvian 8y ago
Interesting story. :) I think businesses can he really hard on fraud without being hard on what constitutes a valid expense.
- jandrese 8y ago
  I wonder how expensive that raincoat was that the person thought it needed to be its own line item on the expense. That's normally what the incidental expenses line is for, so this is just a story of someone who filled out his expense report incorrectly, got it rejected, and then filled it out correctly.
  - deepGem 8y ago
    A good raincoat is pretty expensive. At least $200. So the guy submits an expense report with a $200 line item, gets rejected and splits the $200 into probably 7 or 8 incidentals which usually have a $25 limit, probably on different expense reports.
    - jandrese 8y ago
      I'd take a double take at a $200 line item for an emergency raincoat to replace one that I lost on a trip. I'm not asking the guy to get a plastic poncho for his business meeting, but he doesn't need to get it at the Gucchi store.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Reminds me of a time I worked in a company that reimbursed us for coffee expenses on business travels. In their system, I had to itemize every receipt, so my expense report ended up being 50% made of morning espressos. The secretary handling expenses came back to me pretty annoyed and told me that next time, I should buy a pre-paid Starbucks card instead.
Scoundreller 8y ago
Similar experience at an employer where I was grateful to be travelling on their dime. Took the bus and metro home from the airport - $3 claim rejected because I didn’t get a transfer as proof (which wasn’t needed to ride on this trip). Yet if I drove, I could have claimed 50 cents a km or something, no proof required.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> incorrect hotel amounts What does this mean?

asaph 8y ago
Amount claimed on expense report != amount paid to hotel.

dv_dt 8y ago

Wait, why should she lose her flexible medical benefits? Shouldn't recovery of the expense fraud be a separate legal process from taking of personal medical accounts? Why do we connect medical benefits to employers?

vertexFarm 8y ago
Good question. It's a very strange method of motivation or coercion that we've all just kind of accepted into our lives, and we feel lucky to even have that. Well all of us in the US, anyway. For some reason it doesn't work that way in most places on earth. Medical job-lock is a real thing that happens, and most of us just discount the possibility completely until an unexpected problem crops up. AMHIK. Everyone be grateful for your health while you can, and plan for the future.
jasode 8y ago
>Wait, why should she lose her flexible medical benefits? Because it was one of those "healthcare savings flex accounts" where the company puts in "virtual dollars" to pay for some types of health care. Unlike unused vacation days that requires payout on the last paycheck by law, or a 401k account, this type of "flex account" is really a convenient accounting category that's administered purely by corporate discretion. If the employee gets fired for just cause, the company decided it didn't want to let him/her walk away with the flex account. For the retirees that left on good terms, they do. It's just the way they did things. I think the idea is that the the ex-employee is now viewed as a criminal so the company feels justified in withdrawing discretionary benefits. The regular type of employee health insurance that one could extend with Obamacare or COBRA was a separate thing. (Ninja edit to reply below: it was not an FSA or "cafeteria" plan that deducted real dollars from the employee's paycheck. It was literally "virtual dollars" that the company allocated to the employee. But the virtual money turned into real money when the retiree used it to pay Medicare premiums. If there's an industry-wide jargon for this type of virtual bank account for healthcare that the employee never directly contributed to, I don't know what it is.)
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Maybe you're talking about a different kind of account, but FSA dollars come out of the employee's own paycheck.