Perk, a travel and spend management platform, reported that 1 in 5 employees (20%) regularly misrepresent their expense claims, from inflated receipts to outright fabrication. More than half (56%) have done so at least once, and 72% know a colleague who has.
The findings draw on research covering 8,000 employees across the US, UK, Spain, Germany and France, and point to a system failing at every level, according to Perk: from manual processes with almost no financial control to digital tools that are still letting manipulated claims through.
Nearly a third (31%) of employees still submit expenses manually by email or spreadsheet, according to the report, and those on manual systems are more likely to misrepresent expenses regularly (24%) than those using a dedicated tool.
Formal tools are not solving the problem, said the report, as 18% of employees using structured expense software still submit fraudulent claims on a regular basis. The most commonly misrepresented categories are personal meals, beverages, car use including mileage and rentals, and client entertainment.
For many (32%), misrepresentation starts with a genuine mistake or misunderstanding, and 24% pointed to unclear expense policies. Among the most common methods, 40% of employees have submitted an AI-generated receipt at least once, and 8% do so regularly. A quarter (25%) of those who regularly misrepresent expenses know their company uses AI to detect fraud and continue regardless.
Nikita Miller, chief product officer, said: “Most expense tools are built to review spend after it happens. By then, finance is in cleanup mode, chasing receipts and correcting claims that should never have been submitted. The smarter move is to shift the intervention point earlier. Build policy into the booking flow, match receipts against real-time card data, and make compliance the path of least resistance. When the system is built that way, there is less room for error, claims arrive cleaner, and finance gets back to work that actually moves the business.”
Later this year, according to the report, Perk will bring its integrated travel and spend platform to the US market, combining travel management, events, corporate cards, expense automation and invoice processing in a single solution.
