With an eye on travel policy compliance, processing efficiencies and fraud prevention, Liz Claiborne Inc. is in the midst of a multinational deployment of an integrated expense management system. Connected with the Concur Cliqbook online booking tool, the Concur expense system already is deployed in the United States across Liz Claiborne's 46 brands. Implementation in Canada is scheduled to begin next month, followed by Europe this fall and Asia-Pacific at a later date.
The apparel, accessories and fragrances company began to seek a new, standardized system in part because it had determined that employees had been expensing items not covered by reimbursement policies, including airport lounge memberships. It also realized that its calendar-based, paper expense reporting structure generated far more reports than necessary.
"It went by week, so if somebody traveled three weeks in a row, there would be three expense reports for just one trip," said Rafael Rosario, Liz Claiborne global travel services manager, speaking during a panel here at an Association of Corporate Travel Executives conference. "So that was costing more."
With senior management support, the company selected its vendor and deployed the system in the United States. "We were doing 9,000 expense reports per month," Rosario said, "and we reduced that by almost 50 percent" by switching to a trip-based reporting model.
Rosario said the company also eliminated central billing for airline tickets, which did not show up on individual paper expense reports and had generated "a lot of leakage, a lot of fraud." Instead, Liz Claiborne increased corporate card use--its program now covers 2,800 cards in the United States, 1,200 in Europe and 560 in Canada--and now reports 90 percent compliance to the card program. "Even though we have ghost cards, [purchasing] cards and meeting cards, we did manage to increase use of corporate cards by having this [expense] tool," Rosario explained, noting that the corporate card rebate represented "another way to try to convince management to mandate it that way."
Rosario, who said he spends between a third and half his time dealing with expense management and corporate card data, interfaces not only with Liz Claiborne's finance, human resources, IT and legal departments, but also the company's security department. It is within that department where expense reporting audits occur and "forensics accounting tries to [find people] stealing money from the company." Since implementing the automated expense tool, which, according to Rosario, includes audit programming "to red flag anything that is out of policy," the company has found patterns of expense abuses and fired three employees.
Liz Claiborne is not alone in experiencing expense reporting fraud. A 2006 report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that fraud costs U.S. corporations roughly 5 percent of annual revenues, or $652 billion. Of 1,134 occupational fraud cases studied from Jan. 2004 through 2006, more than 90 percent involved some type of asset misallocation, with 20 percent of that subset related to expense reimbursement.
For Liz Claiborne travelers, one benefit of the new expense reporting system is a short reimbursement cycle. "The turnaround is two days [for expenses] on the corporate card," Rosario said, while travelers filing such out-of-pocket expenses as taxi fares "are getting paid within 24 to 48 hours."
Rosario acknowledged that the integrated system from Concur-the Cliqbook online booking tool linked to the expense system--played a role in the company's decision. "It gives visibility to the traveler," he explained. "There is functionality in Cliqbook called 'one click' that allows you to pre-populate all the information from the travel into the [expense] tool automatically."
That has helped to boost the adoption rate of the online booking tool, which is encouraged for domestic trips, to 72 percent, Rosario said.
Moreover, such integration provides "control over policy, workflow and approval mechanisms," said session moderator Ross Atkinson, vice president of online technology solutions for BCD Travel. "On top of that, you can identify leakage that does not come through preferred channels and you can hone in on behavior."