Fiddled expenses short changing employers
Tuesday, 23rd March 2010
New research from expense management company, GlobalExpense, has suggested that Britain’s employers are failing to curb employee expenses costs.
GlobalExpense published the findings in its Employee Expenses Benchmark Report 2010, which draws on 7.7 million expense claims made by over 250,000 UK-based employees between December 2006 and November 2009.
The report claimed that in 2009 over £8.8bn was paid out by employers to reimburse their staff, but around £2.1bn of this was not covered under the terms of employment and should not have been paid. In fact approximately 11% of all approved expense claims do not comply with company policy.
Workers have, on average, 30 claims a year and examples of unusual employee expense claims paid in 2009 include an inflatable sheep and lap dancers. One company even shelled out a mammoth £88,000 for a phone bill.
David Vine, CEO of GlobalExpense, commented:
“Overall, businesses have cut their employee expense bill by around 9%, but this is almost entirely accounted for by the reduction in fuel prices dropping from a high in 2008. Businesses have either made little effort to tighten expenses policies since the start of the recession, or spectacularly failed to implement them.”
Vine added that around 15% of expense-claiming employees admitted to fiddling their expense claims at some point in time.
GlobalExpense believe their survey highlights the fact that companies need to be careful when drafting an expenses policy and should take action against any employees who abuse the system.
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