Questions arose inside a global energy group about the expense claims of a group of employees in its Indian operation. The allegation was easy to state and hard to prove: over a defined review period, claims had been manufactured. Hotel stays that never happened, restaurant bills written by hand, taxi receipts recycled across colleagues.
“Hotels were asked to confirm whether the guest ever stayed, and restaurants were shown their own purported receipts.”
The investigation, carried out during my tenure at a global investigations firm, checked each claim at its source. Each subject's expense reports were reconstructed against their source bills. Then every doubtful bill was tested in the field: hotels asked to confirm whether the guest ever stayed, restaurants shown their own purported receipts, transport operators asked whether the vehicle and route existed. The verification ran across two cities, one of them outside India, because that is where the claimed travel had gone.
The field work showed a clear pattern: bookings shown as confirmed on an online portal that the hotel had no record of, inflated bills from a business hotel, blank and handwritten receipts from establishments that did not issue them, and an identical taxi vendor appearing across the claims of several unrelated employees.
Every finding in the report was tied to a numbered exhibit, with the claim, the source bill and the vendor’s confirmation side by side. I still work to that standard.