ATTENDANCE RECORDING DEVICES AS CONTROL ON FRAUDULENT EXPENCE AND TRAVEL REIMBURSEMENT CLAIMS

1. In organizations where there is a weak ethical culture - improper or illegal activity is virtually certain to flourish. Where "tone at the top" is especially lacking, frauds by managers and employees can ultimately devastate the organization's financial health and threaten its long-term viability. Among the most easily-exploited procedures in such organizations are those governing travel and expense (T&E). Some of the ways, the employees claim falsified reimbursements are as follows.:-

Putting up claims for the duties which were never performed.
Putting up claims for excessive mileage travelled.

2. Though the businesses are aware that such issues can come up and they have been making efforts to build some business processes to control them, but, most of the controls are human based and can easily be defeated for various reasons. Such issues cause pain, both to the company and to the employee alike

Proposed Preventive Process
3. In today’s world, most of the businesses have attendance recording systems in terms of photo Identity Cards containing embedded electronic chip, Biometric Cards, Code Punching card etc. Aim of each being – to record attendance and to act as access control devices.

4. These devices can be multi tasked to fruitfully detect cases of falsified Expense and Travel claims as well, if they can be integrated with payroll compensation data ware house, as is given below in simple flow chart :-

CARD SWIPE AT ATTENDANCE RECORDING TERMINAL
↓
SWIPE DATA TRAVELS TO DATA STORAGE DEVICE
↓
DATA TRANSFERRED TO MASS DATA STORAGE DEVICE →ATTENDANCE IS RECORDED
↓
DATA LATERALLY TRANSFERRED TO PAYROLL COMPENSATION DATA WARE HOUSE
↓
AS AND WHEN AN EMPLOYEE PUTS UP A CLAIM FOR LOCAL CONVEYANCE – THIS DATA IS MAPPED AGAINST THE ID CARD SWIPE DATA
5. From the above, if it is found that employee was in his routine place of duty at a date and time for which Expense and Travel has been claimed, the system can reject the claim and the employee can be questioned for the reason for such claims

6. Excessive mileage issues can be tackled by getting the correct mileage from originating point to destination point from publically available data base like yahoo map or google map etc.