Getting a forensic accountant involved to pick through just one employee’s expense filings costs, on the low end, about 150 dollars an hour, and the bills can easily run past 300 when the work drags into its third or fourth week. The median loss from an expense reimbursement fraud case, according to the ACFE’s 2024 Report to the Nations, sits at 141000 dollars for businesses with fewer than 100 employees. Line those two figures up next to each other, and it’s not hard to see why most companies treat their expense review process as a formality, cross their fingers, and move on to something else.
Rachel Whitmore works as a forensic accountant out of London and has been pulling apart corporate expense filings for close to nine years at this point, long enough that she says the cases landing on her desk have started to feel almost scripted. “What gets people caught is usually the laziness, not the complexity,” she said during a call last February. “Someone submits the same taxi receipt twice, three months apart, or they file a dinner for six at a restaurant that seats maybe twenty, and nobody at the company remembers the event.” Most of what Whitmore investigates turns out to be pretty mundane, she said, just small overcharges submitted again and again, building up quietly over a year or sometimes two before somebody in the finance department actually looks hard at the numbers. Receipts are usually present in these cases, she added, but they don’t hold up once somebody actually bothers calling the vendor or checking the calendar against the dates on the claim.
An Emburse survey of more than 1000 full time workers in early 2024 found that nearly a quarter of employees admitted to passing off personal purchases as business expenses, and another 15 percent said they had considered doing it. Financial stress was the big motivator there, with 62 percent of those surveyed saying they were worried about money generally, and 27 percent pointing specifically to new commuting costs from return to office mandates as an added strain. Roughly 40 percent of the people surveyed said they had incurred overdraft fees or late fees on business expenses charged to personal cards because their employer’s reimbursement process was slow. The ACFE’s own numbers told a broadly similar story for smaller organizations, where these kinds of fraudulent claims typically ran for about 18 months before anybody caught on. Eighteen months is plenty of time for somebody to change jobs, and by the point a company actually pieces together what went on, the paper trail has usually gotten messy enough that chasing the money back feels like a waste of effort.
According to data from MyReceiptMaker, user activity around replacement receipt generation jumps noticeably in the weeks right before quarterly tax deadlines and corporate audit windows, which, at a minimum, tells you that missing documentation is still a widespread operational headache, even at companies that think they’ve got their filing sorted out. Most businesses have a pretty inflated sense of how well they track receipts, and the actual state of affairs tends to be messier than anyone in management wants to admit, which is exactly the kind of environment where dodgy claims thrive. A finance director at a mid size logistics firm outside Birmingham mentioned to an industry publication last year that her automated system flags maybe one dodgy expense claim per quarter, but whenever they run manual spot checks, they turn up three or four additional ones, and she figures plenty more never get caught at all. Losing ten or fifteen thousand a year to padded dinners and made up parking charges doesn’t trigger the same panic as catching someone fiddling with payroll, so nobody treats it like a real emergency.
Globally, the ACFE puts occupational fraud losses at around 5 percent of annual revenue, and expense reimbursement claims hit smaller companies harder than you’d think, given the relatively modest per claim amounts, mostly because those firms rarely have the automated controls that big corporations rely on. Check tampering and billing fraud get all the attention in these annual reports, but expense claims are harder to police for a simple reason: nobody can agree on what proper documentation even looks like. You’ll find one company demanding itemized receipts for anything north of 25 dollars, while the next one doesn’t bother until 75, and a third will accept a credit card statement on its own with no receipt whatsoever. James Okereke, a compliance consultant based in the Midlands who mostly works with mid market firms, said that the expense policies he encounters during audits are almost always stale. “The policy says meals up to 50 pounds are fine, but nobody adjusted that figure for inflation, and nobody decided what to do about remote work expenses or home office equipment,” he said. “So people just claim things and hope finance doesn’t push back, and finance usually doesn’t.”
The missing receipt is really the load bearing element of the whole thing, because it gives everybody involved a plausible excuse. Someone puts in a 45 dollar lunch claim and shrugs when asked for the receipt, and as long as nothing else in their filing history raises a flag, that’s the end of the conversation. Whitmore estimated that somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the fraudulent claims crossing her desk involve a receipt that’s either gone entirely or been doctored digitally, and she said the line between those two categories has blurred quite a bit recently. The people reviewing these submissions in most companies are junior finance staff who’ve never been trained to verify documents, plowing through piles of expense reports at month’s end when everybody just wants the books closed.
What’s thrown a wrench into the whole picture since about mid 2025 is that AI image generators have gotten good enough to produce receipts that are, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from genuine ones. AppZen’s data showed fake AI receipts making up about 14 percent of fraudulent document submissions by September 2025, a figure that was basically zero the prior year, and the top four expense fraud websites collectively churned out over 3.5 million fake receipts in a six month span. The fakes look real enough to fool anyone who isn’t specifically hunting for problems, with thermal paper grain, the kind of slight blur you’d expect from a phone camera snap, and vendor details that check out right down to the tax math. ICAEW tried to get ahead of it with guidance published late last year, but their suggestions basically came down to verifying vendor addresses and hunting for metadata oddities, and good luck with that if your finance team is already stretched thin and doesn’t have access to forensic tools. Several detection platforms now claim they can flag synthetic artifacts in fabricated receipts, but as of early 2026, not one of them has published independent accuracy data, and the few internal case studies that have leaked out show hit rates all over the map depending on which generator produced the fake.
