Travel & Expense Leakage Reduction

Impact
Geo-plausibility checks, visual forensics, and approval concordance reduced expense leakage and sped up reimbursements.

Scenario

A fast-growing enterprise was struggling with travel & expense (T&E) fraud and inefficiencies.
Employees submitted questionable travel claims, inflated bills, and approvals that didn’t align with actual meetings or outcomes.
Management needed a scalable, explainable system to detect fraud, reduce leakage, and accelerate legitimate reimbursements.

Data Ingested

• Travel bookings (flights, hotels, cabs)

• CRM meeting logs and calendars

• Maps & location data (geo-coordinates, travel routes)

• Toll & fuel bills

• Email approvals for expenses

• Expense claims and receipts

• Sales outcomes linked to the trips

Process (The Prevention Loop in Action)

Ingest: Collected bookings, receipts, CRM meeting entries, and approval emails into a single secure dataset.
Normalize: Standardized formats for cross-referencing times, distances, and expenses.
Link: Connected travel bookings to actual meeting data and sales results.
Analyze:

• Geo-distance/time plausibility: verified that travel claims matched realistic routes and schedules.

• Visual document forensics: detected altered receipts or duplicate submissions.

• Approval concordance: checked if approving managers had full context and policy compliance.

• Meetings-to-sales linkage: assessed ROI of travel spend.

  Act:

• Generated exception queues with explainable flags for finance review.

• Built recovery and coaching workflows for policy violators.

• Proposed refinements to travel and expense policy.
  Learn: Embedded T&E plausibility checks into ongoing Controls-as-Code testing.

Output

• Exception list of fraudulent or non-compliant claims with evidence.

• Recovery workflows to reclaim funds from violators.

• Policy refinement proposals to prevent recurrence.

Impact

• Significant reduction in T&E leakage.

• Faster reimbursements for legitimate claims.

• Cleaner audit trails and stronger policy adherence.

• Improved ROI from travel budgets by linking spend to sales outcomes.

Struggling with expense fraud or slow reimbursements?
Run our 72-Hour Baseline Map to flag anomalies, accelerate payouts, and tighten controls.