In search of a better source of truth for expense management

Why AI-Era Expense Management Demands a New Foundation

Most CFOs know expense fraud happens. What's harder to accept is that their current controls may not be doing much to stop it.

Our latest research shows one in five employees (20%) misrepresent expenses regularly — a signal that for many companies, their approach to expense management is providing an illusion of control, not the real thing.

Misrepresented expenses come in different forms

It's a familiar scenario: a work receipt goes missing and the panic sets in. Over half of employees (56%) admit to misreporting expenses at least once, and seven in ten (72%) know a colleague who has done the same. 

But our data also shows that one in five employees (20%) misrepresent their expenses regularly. The most common type of misrepresentation is submitting AI-generated receipts, with 8% of all employees submitting these regularly and 40% have submitted such a receipt at least once in the past. 

Nearly a third of employees (31%) submit expenses by email or spreadsheet, compared with 68% who use a more formal tool, like a dedicated expense app or an ERP. Manual processes offer almost no meaningful financial control — just retrospective processing. Unsurprisingly, regular misrepresentation thrives among those organizations. Employees on manual systems are more likely to regularly misrepresent expenses (24%) than those using a dedicated tool. But even in companies with structured expense tools, misrepresented claims go unnoticed with nearly one in five (18%) employees submitting such claims regularly.

Illusion of control

Some of the manipulation reflects a belief that existing fraud controls aren't consistent enough to catch it — especially for low-value claims. Over a quarter (28%) of employees who regularly misrepresent expenses justify it on the basis of low value, and one in five (23%) didn't expect their submission to be closely reviewed. 

Our data suggests that there may be a gap in sophistication between the two types of AI tools – the ones for generating or editing receipts and one for spotting them – which opens the door to detection failure. A quarter (25%) of those who regularly misrepresent expenses already know their company uses AI detection for spotting fraudulent claims — and yet they continue to do that. 

Policy and process friction play a role too in misreported claims. The most commonly cited reasons are pressure to cover work costs out of pocket (31%) and slow reimbursement (28%). In other words, some employees use AI tools or editing software to smooth a receipt through the system or to speed things up. A lack of clarity around what's actually allowed within expense policy compounds the problem (26%). 

These misreported expenses come at a cost. The employees who regularly misreport their expenses estimate the value of these to total around $330 in the US and £320 in the UK. 

These direct costs are also only the tip of the iceberg; there are additional time and productivity losses to consider. Previous research commissioned by Perk into Shadow work identified significant friction in the expense-claiming process leading to substantial productivity loss — with employees spending nearly 48 hours annually on expense-claiming related tasks.

The diagnosis: many businesses have only an illusion of control when it comes to expense management. Manual systems offer almost no actual control, but even formalized tools are letting manipulated claims through. While failing detection is part of the problem, system issues around friction also contribute to misrepresented expenses. Both of these come at a cost to organizations, and as AI tools become more sophisticated and more widely used, this problem will only grow. For CFOs, the answer isn't to patch the existing system — it's to rethink its foundations.

The receipt is no longer a reliable source of truth

Traditional expense management is built on a simple premise: the employee submits a receipt, which is then verified. The receipt is the only evidence and everything flows from it.

The problem is that receipts have become now the easiest thing in the process to manipulate. Editing tools, AI image generation, and template-based receipt builders mean any employee can produce a convincing document in minutes. When the receipt is the only point of evidence — and that evidence can be altered or invented — the control framework is built on sand.

Three imperatives for finance leaders

For CFOs who want to move from the illusion of control to the real thing, there are three strategic priorities.

1. Focus on strategic control: Create a trusted foundation for expense management 

Corporate card transaction data — received directly from the card issuer — gives you something a receipt can never provide: an independent, unalterable record of the transaction that exists before any expense submission is made. It doesn't rely on the employee to create or submit the evidence; it's already there.

When card data becomes the anchor point, the receipt shifts from being the source of truth to a secondary verification step — something that should match an existing record, not create one. That fundamentally changes the calculus for those who intend to fraud.

Yet card infrastructure remains deeply underdeployed. In our survey, 66% of employees either have no access to a corporate card, or work in organizations where cards are restricted by seniority or function. Without that independent data layer, expense submissions exist in a verification vacuum.

All-in-one platforms that connect bookings, corporate card payments and expense processing in a single system create a structural advantage. When business travel is booked and paid with a company card within the same system, the transaction is captured automatically. The system isn't evaluating a receipt in isolation — it's matching a receipt against a transaction record that already exists. The receipt is just confirmation.

2. Unlock real insights: Eliminate Friction to facilitate legitimate claiming 

Here's another finding from the data: 42% of employees aren't claiming legitimate expenses at all — mostly because the expense value was too small to justify the effort. It means some employees are misrepresenting expenses while others are absorbing costs they're entitled to recover.

The path of least resistance must be the better path. Many legacy systems require employees to input vast amounts of detail for each claim, making it especially burdensome for smaller claims. Modern tools offer AI-led capability for automatic data capture, simple receipt upload and employee confirmation process, which cuts the time spent per expense down to seconds. When integrated with cards, the expense is matched automatically, also minimizing the time required from the finance team. 

This matters for fraud prevention because a common rationalization for small-scale manipulation is that employees are "evening out" costs they couldn't be bothered to claim legitimately. Remove the friction, and you remove the justification for misreporting and under-claiming and unlock a more realistic view on your total expenses. 

3. Future-Proof Control: Implement Proactive Guardrails Over Reactive Policing

Retrospective anomaly detection catches inconsistencies after the spending has happened. Many ERP solutions have bolted on this kind of functionality — and it helps, especially those that leverage AI-based verification and not just optical character recognition. But these tools are still reactive: the spending has already occurred, and it has to be settled somehow.

There are a range of levers that Finance teams can use to proactively control expenses. Integration of business travel policies into booking systems can be powerful in guiding choice and limiting out-of-policy spending before it happens. AI-based tools can help to show to employees what they can book within their allowed policies. Similarly, using corporate card controls like spend limits can be applied at the individual card-level to put a cap on how much each card user can spend, preventing transactions going above a certain value. Merchant category controls (MCCs) also enable finance teams to restrict card use with certain business types or categories before a transaction can be made, such as restricting ATM cash withdrawals. Lodge cards — dedicated cards for hotel and accommodation spending pre-loaded into the booking platform — are a powerful way to mitigate risk. As higher-value travel bookings are made with Lodge Cards, lower spend limits can then be applied to individuals' cards, mitigating the potential risk for misuse. 

The use of proactive levers of control can free finance teams’ time from reactive policing and provide time for more strategic activities. Therefore, corporate cards come with control levers that retrospective detection simply can't replicate. 

What this means for the CFO's agenda

The shift finance leaders need to make is about creating better foundations for managing expenses. 

Card infrastructure creates an independent, unalterable record of spend. Automated matching removes the manual overhead from reconciliation — the endless stream of chasing receipts, rekeying data, and reconciling submissions that should have matched automatically. Spend controls on cards guide behavior before money moves. And a frictionless employee experience is the only way to ensure the system gets used by everyone, not just those most motivated to push through the friction.

Finance teams are skilled at building controls. The challenge now is making sure those controls are built on the right foundation. In a world where a convincing receipt takes seconds to generate, the receipt can no longer be that foundation.

The companies that get this right won't just reduce fraud. They'll free their finance teams from reactive policing and give them back the time to focus on work that actually moves the business forward.

Future-proofing financial control starts with a new question — not "how do we verify the receipt?" but "why are we still relying on the receipt at all?"

Partnering with Perk to future-proof financial controls

See how Perk’s Smart Corporate Cards saved an Australia hospitality business 750 Working Hours and a 57% reduction in expense processing costs.

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About the research

Perk commissioned Censuswide to conduct an online survey of 8,000 employed professionals who travel for work at least twice a year, file expenses for work travel, and work at companies with 250 or more employees, across five markets: United Kingdom (n=2,000), United States (n=2,000), Spain (n=1,000), Germany (n=2,000), and France (n=1,000). Fieldwork was conducted between 15 and 28 April 2026. The survey asked questions about the frequency of work travel in a year and their expense claiming, including the value of those claims which they had misrepresented, where relevant. The value of misrepresented expenses is a mean for the estimates that the respondents provided in value bands and the result has been rounded to the nearest ten. For the band the midpoint has been taken as the value estimate. The time spent on expenses is based on Forrester Consulting research commissioned by Perk. This study identified that employees who file expenses across US, UK, Germany, France, Spain and Netherlands had on average 26 instances of expense claiming a year, each instance taking 110minutes, totalling almost 48 hours a year spent on expenses per employee.