Fraud and Compliance
How to Redesign T&E Approvals to Actually Catch Fraud: G2 Users Explain What Works
Most organizations believe their T&E approval process is a control. But in practice, it is sometimes more like a checkbox. Managers approve expenses in bulk, receipts go unread, and policy violations slip through unnoticed, often for months. Instead of asking, "does the approval workflow exist?" ask: "Is the approval workflow designed to effectively catch fraud?"
So what does a T&E process look like when it is genuinely built to detect fraud before reimbursement? In this blog, we pull together insights from verified G2 reviewers, a real-world case study from Merck, and a look at how SAP Concur tools including Verify, Intelligent Audit, and Detect are closing the gap between approval workflows that look like controls and ones that actually work like them.
The Number That Should Concern Every Finance Director
42% of organizations using automated expense auditing tools report catching fraud that manual review entirely missed, compared to just 9% detection rates in manual-only environments.
This financial exposure compounds with every reporting cycle. And it is precisely the gap that G2 reviewers say the AI-driven audit tools from Concur can help close.
Why Expense Approvals Miss Policy Violations
Finance directors are often surprised to discover the root cause is structural, not behavioral. Manual approvers face three compounding problems:
- Volume bias. Approvers processing 50+ reports per week spend an average of 90 seconds per report, which is not enough time to verify receipts against policy.
- Familiarity effect. Direct reports' expenses are approved faster and scrutinized less, regardless of compliance.
- Retroactive detection. Without real-time rules, violations are identified in quarterly audits, after reimbursement has already been made.
The result is that the approval workflow, which should be a primary control, becomes a rubber stamp. G2 users describe this dynamic repeatedly and highlight how using Concur solutions can help fundamentally change the model.
What G2 Reviewers Say About AI-Driven Expense Audit and Fraud Detection
Concur earned its G2 Fall 2025 recognition in part because verified users cited measurable improvements in fraud detection and policy enforcement. Here is what they highlighted:
“When I’m clicking into an invoice it’s very easy to see the approval workflows and audit trails. This helps when auditors have queries on certain costs or I need to reach out to the approver of the invoice to query the cost in the first place” – G2 Reviewer
“On the approval side, the workflows feel smooth and transparent—managers can review and approve or reject claims within minutes. Finally, the built-in audit trail and policy compliance checks have noticeably reduced errors and helped ensure our finance team stays in control.” – G2 Reviewer
“It integrates travel booking and expense reporting into a single, seamless workflow. The use of AI and OCR to scan receipts and automatically populate expense fields, saving significant time. Transactions from corporate cards flow directly into the system for easy reconciliation. This really helps me. Audit flags alert me immediately if an expense violates company policy before I submit it. Best is mobile app which allows for capturing receipts and approving reports on the go.” – G2 reviewer
“What I like best about SAP Concur is how it simplifies expense management and improves visibility over employee spending. I find the automated approval workflows, receipt matching, and clear audit trail particularly useful. It reduces manual data entry, helps ensure expenses comply with company policies, and makes month-end reconciliation more efficient. The reporting features also make it easier to review transactions, investigate discrepancies, and maintain accurate financial records.” – G2 Reviewer
The Expense Fraud Controls That Actually Work
G2 reviewers do not just praise the tools. They explain the configurations that make the difference. These controls are confirmed in Concur solutions capabilities:
- Receipt Validation Against Four Data Points: The AI audit automatically matches every submitted receipt against the date, amount, vendor, expense type, and receipt image clarity, flagging discrepancies that human approvers routinely miss at scale.
- Duplicate Detection Across Submissions and Card Programs: Compliance services, including Intelligent Audit and Verify, can identify the same charge submitted on multiple cards, across different expense reports, or by different employees, helping detect potential duplicates without leaving Concur Expense.
- AI-Powered Policy Library for Airfare and Accommodation: ML models, trained on decades of expense data, automatically identify out-of-policy scenarios including non-economy airfare and excessive hotel charges, without requiring manual configuration of every scenario.
- Pre-Approval Audit Insertion: Rather than auditing after reimbursement, Intelligent Audit places policy checks before the expense reaches a manager's queue. This catches violations at the point they can still be corrected, not after funds have been disbursed.
- Spend Anomaly Detection via Historical Benchmarking: Concur Verify and Intelligent Audit leverages decades of aggregated expense data to identify spending anomalies, specifically amounts or patterns that fall outside normal ranges for an employee's role, region, or expense category.
- Multi-Language, Global Policy Enforcement: Intelligent Audit's team of global auditors validates receipts and ensures policy compliance across all languages supported in SAP Concur Travel and Expense, resolving exceptions directly with employees and escalating only genuine issues.
How Merck Scaled AI Expense Audit Across 75 Countries
When Merck moved from on-premise to cloud-based expense management, they deployed Concur solutions in more than 75 countries and issued 40,000 payment cards in under 10 months. By inserting Intelligent Audit before manager approval, Merck increased speed to reimbursement, reduced card delinquency, and eliminated a significant volume of exception-handling work from their system. The result was a compliance process that scaled globally without adding headcount to the audit team.
The 6-Step T&E Fraud Detection Workflow
Step 1: Submission and Automated Capture
Employees can submit expense reports from their mobile device or web browser, while receipts are captured and structured data is extracted automatically. This can help reduce the risk of altered or fabricated receipts. AI technology from SAP Concur can also help identify AI-generated receipts, adding another layer of protection against potentially fraudulent expenses.
Step 2: Verify, AI Audit of 100% of Reports
Concur Verify automatically scans every submitted report using AI and ML models. It checks receipt validity, identifies spending anomalies against historical benchmarks, and flags potential policy violations before any human sees the report.
Step 3: Intelligent Audit, Human and AI Hybrid Review
Flagged exceptions are routed to Intelligent Audit, where expert human auditors supported by AI validate receipts, reviews for client specific custom compliance checks, including item-level tax values, confirm supporting documentation, and resolve exceptions directly with employees in their native language.
Step 4: Manager Approval, Informed Rather Than Blind
Where manager approval follows Audit in the workflow, only reports that have cleared automated and hybrid audit reach the manager's approval queue, already annotated with any remaining flags. Approvers focus on decisions, not detection. The rubber stamp problem is structurally eliminated.
Step 5: Concur Detect, Continuous Monitoring
Concur Detect by Oversight runs ongoing Post Pay across all submitted expense data, identifying duplicate charges, unusual patterns, and cross-card risks in real time. Finance directors receive exception reports rather than discovering issues in annual audits.
Step 6: Consulting and Trend Analysis
Regular consulting sessions built into the Intelligent Audit service allow finance teams to review exception details, identify systemic trends, and determine actionable next steps, turning individual fraud catches into organization-wide compliance improvements.
5 Ways Finance Leaders Can Catch T&E Fraud Before Reimbursement
The gap between a T&E approval process that catches fraud and one that simply processes expenses is not a budget problem. It is a design problem.
- Shift audit to pre-approval. Configure Intelligent Audit or Verify to run before reports reach manager queues. Catching violations at submission is categorically more effective than catching them after disbursement.
- Enable 100% automated coverage. Replace sample-based manual review with Verify and Intelligent Audit’s full-population AI scan. The cases most likely to be fraudulent are specifically designed to fall below the thresholds that trigger manual review.
- Activate continuous monitoring. Add Concur Detect by Oversight to identify Post Pay analytics and detect non-compliant trends.
- Use consulting data to close systemic gaps. Work with the Intelligent Audit team to review exception trends by region, category, and business unit, and update policies based on what the data reveals rather than what you suspect.
- Enforce policy at the category and country level. Leverage the multi-language, global policy enforcement capabilities in Concur to apply differentiated rules without adding manual overhead to your finance team.
The Validation Finance Teams Have Been Waiting For
Redesigning T&E approvals to actually catch fraud is not a matter of working harder or reviewing more reports. It is a matter of putting the right automated controls in the right place, before violations become reimbursements and reimbursements become losses. The finance teams represented in this article did exactly that, and the G2 community took notice.
After being recognized as a G2 Leader in Expense Management for Summer 2026, Concur went on to again be named as a leader for Fall 2026, a distinction awarded based on verified user reviews covering satisfaction, usability, and real-world results. For finance directors evaluating whether their current approval process is a genuine control or a procedural formality, that recognition reflects something concrete: organizations that have made the switch say it works, and they say so by name.
FAQs
What is the most effective way to detect expense fraud in T&E?
The most effective approach combines pre-approval automated audit with continuous post-payment monitoring. Tools like Concur Verify and Intelligent Audit scan 100% of expense reports before they reach a manager's queue, catching violations at the point they can still be corrected. Adding Concur Detect by Oversight layers in ongoing monitoring for duplicate charges and spending anomalies after reimbursement, ensuring nothing slips through over time.
Why do manual T&E approvals miss expense fraud?
Three structural problems compound the issue. Approvers handling high report volumes simply do not have enough time to verify every receipt against policy. Familiarity bias means direct reports' expenses get approved faster and scrutinized less. And because most manual review happens after reimbursement, violations are only caught in quarterly audits, long after funds have already been disbursed.
How can SAP Concur help with expense fraud?
SAP Concur addresses expense fraud through a layered set of controls: automated receipt validation, duplicate detection across card programs, AI-powered policy enforcement, and pre-approval audit insertion. Verified G2 reviewers cite measurable improvements in policy compliance, audit trail visibility, and the ability to flag violations before reports ever reach a manager.
What is the difference between Concur Verify, Intelligent Audit, and Concur Detect?
Each tool operates at a different point in the workflow. Concur Verify runs an automated AI and ML scan of 100% of submitted reports, checking receipt validity and flagging anomalies before any human review. Intelligent Audit adds a hybrid layer, where expert human auditors supported by AI validate flagged exceptions, confirm documentation, and resolve issues directly with employees in their native language. Concur Detect by Oversight runs continuously after reimbursement, monitoring all expense data for duplicate charges, unusual patterns, and cross-card risks.
