Seriously? 30 percent? That seems quite unbelievable unless you're defining your terms to include reimbursements that are within most normal travel policies. EDITED e.g. employees book their preferred airlines, hotel chains, etc. even if they're not the absolute cheapest.
Additionally, in corporate America there used to be somewhat of an understood agreement that when traveling for work (and being away from your family, not getting paid for a 24hr day, etc) that that burden would be partially be made up for by nice hotels, meals, etc.
ADDED: Class of airfare is a tough one because the delta $$ are so much most of the time. Business class travel does become something of a perk for people above a certain level. It's true those people do tend to travel more and are more tightly scheduled but it's a loose correlation.
But for hotels and meals, it's always been pretty much common sense for me. No one expects me to stay in Fleabag Motel but eyebrows would doubtless be raised if I made a habit of staying at a $1,000 per night high-end hotel unless there were special circumstances such as an event at an isolated location. (Or it was in Silicon Valley--saw a Marriott Courtyard going for $1100/night the other week :-))
The companies I worked for it was usually depending on the travel time. Currently we get to fly in business for flights > 3 hours (which I think is generous). Managing directors probably get to fly first class on such flights, though
Seat upgrades on planes are pretty hard to come by these days. The only time I've managed it is when literally all of the flights into a city were booked and the only seats left were first class. Also, weirdly the price delta on those first class seats were way lower than I expected, only a couple hundred bucks.
Yeah, I have pretty good status on United (Platinum) and I almost never get an upgrade unless I'm flying at some off-hour over the weekend these days. I was barely even able to use a couple of free upgrade certificates this year and I've even tried to do a miles + cash upgrade for a couple international flights and nothing's been available. Most flights are near capacity these days.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of what they are counting as fraud is simple errors due to a badly designed expense system. For example, when you reimburse a hotel you have to manually create a second category with an obscure label for the taxes, and anybody who hasn't been told about it never knows, so they put the whole cost of the hotel room in the hotel line and suddenly are both overbilling (the room charge) and underbilling (the taxes).
Another easy way to commit fraud is to forget to include your travel hours in your expenses. So you aren't charging them for the time sitting on the plane, which is a violation of reporting guidelines and expense charging guidelines.
There are tons of ways an ordinary employee can screw up their expense report without realizing it. This is why they are supposed to be checked by a knowledgeable third party before being committed. If the person in the example was blatantly overcharging for hotel rooms for years without being caught then that's a failure of the expense reporting system.
That's a function of your expense system/requirement. I certainly don't take the time to itemize every line item on a multi-day hotel bill. I just put the amount and the number of days.
>Another easy way to commit fraud is to forget to include your travel hours in your expenses.
That assumes you're charging a client by time--including travel time. I must say it was nice the one time I did some legal work to be able to bill for travel and random administrivia related to the case.
I have occasionally run into hotels where the price per night changes while I'm staying there. Las Vegas has hotels that do this for example. It's kind of weird to have to ask for permission to go over your limit for 2 of your 5 nights. Fortunately, every hotel receipt I've ever received has the nights and taxes broken out so it's just copying numbers onto the form.
They can probably claim a credit on the sales taxes they’ve paid on the sales taxes they have to remit on their own sales (VAT/GST/HST).
Now it depends if the sales tax they paid is eligible for that (in country or foreign).
I'm sure this is the kind of fraud that this thing would detect. "Ah, you split your meal between two different food stands! That is fraud!"