Concur Debuts Compliance Detection Expense System

Concur Technologies today launched Concur Compliance Solutions, a set of software and services addressing the need for more visibility into corporate spending, compliance and T&E fraud.

Designed to work in conjunction with Concur's Corporate Expense Management products, the new functionality adheres to more stringent auditing and financial reporting controls set in place by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Passed last year, the legislation responded to the emergence of high-profile corporate fraud cases a la Enron and WorldCom.

"Sarbanes-Oxley will require financial management solutions that can provide greater visibility, communication, control and fraud prevention," said John Van Decker, vice president of Meta Group, an IT research and strategic consulting firm, in a statement. "Travel and entertainment expenses represent a unique category of spend since it is driven primarily by a company's entire employee base. Process automation provides an important framework that integrates approval and workflow processes enabling a far greater level of visibility and control than exists in manual environments and if not already automated, should be high on the enterprise list of future IT projects."

The Redmond, Wash.-based expense management vendor's software gives clients the ability to write more rules into the software to help automatically flag fraudulent or exceptional expenses. It also offers a variety of search criteria to help expense managers track T&E spending and compliance trends in an organization.

Elena Donio, Concur vice president of sales and marketing--citing a study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners--said that 22 percent of corporate fraud comes from expense reporting schemes.

Through the offering, Concur is leveraging its partnership with business intelligence software provider Cognos Inc., which powers the system.