I Falsified an expenses claim, so now what

[feelprettyawful]

sorry long explanation, but decision is whether to come clean or not...

Normal practice at my work is we pay in advance out of pocket for travel expenses & claim back later. This worked fine until sudden trip cancellations due to covid.

I tried to get refunds for everything covid-cancelled but then to keep the repayment claim applications simple, on one item I claimed full price rather than the 3 different partial refund claims I could have done for same value. Difference from auditors' viewpoint is about £40 out of Account A that I was actually refunded for and should have claimed out of Account B. I don't know if I still have all the original tickets etc. but I may have images of them. And emails showing partial refunds, etc.

Auditor is asking for proof I tried to get refunds on everything. I either come clean about the falsification using my partial/failed real claims to refund.. or ... try to keep up the lies. I am half tempted to come clean & if I lose my job and career that might have its own merits, anyway, although it would upset a lot of people and put me in poverty, I suppose.

It matters to me that I have worked about 300 hours unpaid this year. All the time I spend trying talking to auditor is also unpaid hours. I understand that The auditor won't give a shit about my unpaid hours and neither do I suppose will most MNers. I am net out of pocket still, technically, just £4 or so.

Irk. How fucked am I?

@justlonelystars

I’m an auditor and I can tell you there is no way I would care about £40. Are they the external year end auditors or what? Or internal auditors? I would come clean personally, it sounds confusing to be honest and your work might let £40 slide

Depends on the context though. If it's part of their fraud-detection checks, they may be looking for anomalies, not at the amount. DH works for a global company with a $20 billion turnover, but one of their managers was detected in a fraud worth about £120!

I don't really understand what you did exactly but it doesn't sound like an issue to me?

I would do as follows:

1. Provide the original form with the claim.
2. Provide all the receipts and info.

Do not volunteer any information more than is asked - if they say you have made the mistake apologise without explaining and ask what you need to do to rectify it. Everybody makes mistakes and you haven't actually stolen the money if you are still owed GBP 4.00

I hate audits.

I'm struggling to understand exactly what happened. So you took a trip related to company A but then expended it to company B. I can understand how an error may have occurred but why did you do it on purpose? What s it got to do with refunds? Surely if you think you might be able to get a refund you make the expense then when you're refunded you say "wasn't expecting them to actually do it, great news I can refund you x amount - pls give me the bank details".

I do a bit if stuff like this and colleagues audit it first and just send a spreadsheet saying "these ones are incorrect please put the correct project in so we can charge client" NBD

Tell the truth

As far as I can make out OP had multiple receipts for cancelled trips, some of which only part refunded. In order to get something approximating the amount due in expenses before the deadline, OP combined two sets of expenses (Account A and Account B) and charged them to Account A. £40 of it should have been charged to Account B. She is still owed £4 in expenses.

It's in the OP. Three expenses with partial refunds. She claimed for one at full cost with no refund as it was approximately the right amount. But that didn't reflect reality or charge the expenses to the right accounts. As I understand it anyway.

totally depends on what your job is? if you are an accountant/financial director/police officer/etc then if you dont come clean and there is an issue then you are fucked - in a general position, its a paltry sum and ignorance is your friend.

Having previously audited I am seriously struggling to understand you.
Please get some perspective here. This is a minor minor issue.

Writing as an auditor (used to be external, now internal) I can't see how anyone will care about £40. (Apart from junior auditors who think that they now have to put the error into their results and extrapolate it over a population and then face testing another 100 samples.... 😂 Anyway, enough auditor chat there).

Just explain that now that you're looking back at the records, this mistake must have happened between Accounts A and B when processing high volumes of partial refunds. It is just a tiny completely immaterial allocation error. Be honest and act a bit thick/confused/embarrassed.

@Justiceisblind

so in my professional no one would bat an eyelid at the original mistake but you would be struck off for this:

"I'd fudge the emails from vendors (fwd the emails but edit the content)
there are never going to follow up directly"

don't do it.

One lie always leads to another. Tell them you made an error. Nobody will sack you for an error. The minute you start editing forms and lying you are on the slippery slope. You submitted your claim knowing it to be false, which is theft. You have been given the opportunity to fess up. Use it.

Try and convince them you don’t remember. Say you cannot seem to find the backup info they need. If you haven’t done it before they have no reason to not believe you. Sounds like you’ve given yourself the kick you need to never do it again.

@apples24

Writing as an auditor (used to be external, now internal) I can't see how anyone will care about £40. (Apart from junior auditors who think that they now have to put the error into their results and extrapolate it over a population and then face testing another 100 samples.... 😂 Anyway, enough auditor chat there).

Just explain that now that you're looking back at the records, this mistake must have happened between Accounts A and B when processing high volumes of partial refunds. It is just a tiny completely immaterial allocation error. Be honest and act a bit thick/confused/embarrassed.

Not to continue (but actually to continue it...), a lot of the junior auditors in my day would ignore it precisely so they didn't have to sample test another 100 expense claims!

Don't lie as you would dig into a deeper whole. The fact you are £4 out of pocket goes in your favour

I would say something like it was so chaotic and you need to go back through your records to work out what has happened

Then email explaing you got mixed uk and that in fact you are owed £4 and what needs to be done to reconcile the accounts.

You don't get sacked for making a mistake but you do get sacked for lying/fraud.

I wouldn’t lie - I think I would do as @christinarossetti19 said.

You don't get sacked for making a mistake but you do get sacked for lying/fraud

And absolutely this too.

Do them a little summary saying you've noticed that £40 should be reallocated from Account A to Account B, and that you've under-claimed by £4 so will put in another claim to rectify that.

Ask them to specify what exactly they want for their audit. Are you really under an obligation to ask for a refund for every single thing? If not, say "No, I prioritised pursuing the refunds that I had a reasonable chance of securing".

Don't go confessing to your imagined transgression.... but absolutely don't fudge emails etc. I can't believe anyone would suggest that. It's fraud, you would quite rightly be fired for that. You do not need to take desperate criminal measures when this can be explained away as a small paperwork error /miscalculation, especially as you're still out of pocket!

Going forwards, paying then reclaiming is pretty standard so I don't know how you can get round that. Unless they issue you with a company credit card.

Falsify is different from estimate.
If you genuinely tried to submit a correct claim and now it seems you got your sums wrong that is not fraud.

Deliberately and knowingly over claiming is another thing.

Agree with what @Justiceisblind is saying. If you frame it as ‘coming clean’ it sounds like you’ve done something terrible, which in reality you haven’t really. You haven’t defrauded the company, you didn’t financially gain, you just didn’t follow the correct process.

I’m a head of HR. I think it would be very heavy handed for you to be dismissed for this. But if you try to cover it up or deny it, that’s a more serious issue.

What’s going to make you sleep soundly at night? I get a feeling from your posts that it will be telling the truth. So I would gather everything together, submit it and go for the ‘simplifying the process’ explanation a PP gave.

It’s certainly true that a lie often leads to lots of lies and those certainly could end up landing you in more trouble that the truth.

Be honest, don't lie. The amount is very unlikely to be material in the audit but there is a controls issue which is why it will be looked into further. If you overclaimed £40 what is to stop someone over claiming more? Cumulatively, that could be material. Was the claim not double checked and authorised by someone more senior? If so, why have they not queried it at the time and requested receipts. Surely the payment was made by another individual and you cannot just draw whatever sums you want? If it's an honest mistake I wouldn't worry about your position. If the answers to the above are no then I would think the auditor is digging deeper to find more weaknesses in the procedures and controls.

@december212

Be honest, don't lie. The amount is very unlikely to be material in the audit but there is a controls issue which is why it will be looked into further. If you overclaimed £40 what is to stop someone over claiming more? Cumulatively, that could be material. Was the claim not double checked and authorised by someone more senior? If so, why have they not queried it at the time and requested receipts. Surely the payment was made by another individual and you cannot just draw whatever sums you want? If it's an honest mistake I wouldn't worry about your position. If the answers to the above are no then I would think the auditor is digging deeper to find more weaknesses in the procedures and controls.

All true, but none of that is Ops problem - control weaknesses will be company wide if they exist so this one incident won't make a difference. They will no doubt test a lot of other transactions so the op should not be killing themselves over something so trivial in the grand scheme of things.

OP seriously - tell them you've lost the receipts and evidence of claims. They can go whistle for £40. If this is external auditors then they are insane for spending hours on £40, I'd be furious and looking to change my auditors if they spent this amount of time on an immaterial transaction - it's probably cost the business hundreds while they've been messing around with this 🙄.

Mydarling I agree, poster should not be overly stressing out - I very much doubt they are assuming she has falsified her claim. More that they are looking for issues and getting a good handle of what has went wrong in the procedures for expense claims so they can recommend improvements. As you say, that is a company issue, not one the poster should be worrying about.

I deal with ££££ expenses, approve, bill, invoice. When we started the company we failed to recognise duplicate expenses - one consultant consistently submitted duplicates- 100% genuine mistake, not thick - just too busy doing work for the clients, too many expenses and not enough time to claim them. We changed our expenses software and checking processes. Most consultants are more likely to miss out on expenses, We refund the client if we spot it. And we alert the consultants to their missing expense if we find that too!
Do not lie - we are understanding about being overworked and not putting full attention into admin - although we don’t encourage that culture. We would sack you for lying, lying about anything.

OP don't fudge emails or forms like a PP suggested. Yes it's unlikely they would check, but IF they did, that would be a far greater transgression.

Will it really take hours to pull all the receipts? How many are there?

Are you in finance? Surely the auditor would initially have been checking to see what records the accounts team have for the expense payment - why are they now following up directly with the claimant? If they find an issue that the finance team don't have appropriate records of expense claims, that's a control issue to report to management, but unlikely to be material to the company's accounts.

Is it an internal auditor checking on client billings?

First step would be to just send them ALL the costs and refunds for both accounts (ignore that they are only asking about account A. You have combined them, so play a bit thick/as though you are just sending them everything they have asked for, being as helpful as possible and sending them everything you have as soon as you can).

Then if they come back saying it looks like you have over claimed (for Accunt A) do the work to summarise and send them a simple spreadsheet listing gross costs for account (client?) A, refunds for account A, amount you should have claimed. Then the same for Account B. The total you should have claimed for both accounts, what you actually claimed and then the difference (that you could claim now) with an "oops, looks like I got these 2 accounts a bit muddled, here's what should have happened".

Honestly, unless you are the one billing these costs onto clients AND approving your own expense claims for reimbursement, you are not the one who has made the mistake here.

Do not lie - we are understanding about being overworked and not putting full attention into admin - although we don’t encourage that culture. We would sack you for lying, lying about anything.

^^ This.