How to Stop Expense Account Padding

For employees who travel or entertain clients regularly, expense accounts are serious business. Rumors of expense account padding can put serious pressure on a manager or supervisor to root out unethical practices. After all, if you discover an employee is pilfering 20 dollars every time he leaves town, you may question the integrity of his of work. Read on to learn more.

Instructions

1. Enforce a company policy that applies to everyone. The company must set firm reimbursement guidelines and they must apply to everyone equally across the board. Allowing 50 dollars to slide for the top salesperson tells others that fraud pays.

2. Create a reasonable expense account. If account executives must wine and dine their clients, don't set a low cap that forces employees to dig into their own pockets to close the sale. Stingy policies beg employees to cheat.

3. Require employees to get two signatures for expense approval. One can be from the employee's direct supervisor and the other should be from someone in the company's finance or payroll department.

4. Ask employees to submit expense reports regularly. When reports lag, employees make errors, both intentional and accidental.

5. Conduct regular audits of expense account usage. Auditors look for suspicious expenditures such as multiple receipts from the same restaurant on the same day or blank receipts with unusually high charges.

6. Reiterate appropriate expenditures during regular employee meetings. Although the repetition seems redundant, it keeps the issue in the front of employees' minds and lets them know that the company takes expense account policies seriously. This reduces the likelihood of occasional petty abuses.