i work in a big 4 consulting group, and it's noticeable that we're sacking a lot more staff at the moment for fiddling their expenses (although the reason is rarely publicised).is this common across the industry? i can see why it's happening in this climate but it does seem quite harsh (as the police are sometimes called in) if the real problem is poor controls over expenses and a culture of bending the rules at all levels.

I haven't found that expense-fiddling is common across the industry though, anecdotally, it is common in certain large firms. I've never heard of police being called in before - unless you're talking book-cooking levels of fraud, it sounds like a high visibility scare tactic to make other people stop of their own accord.

When you say "fiddle" what level are we talking? £10's, £100's, £1000's? Putting one or two personal calls through on the mobile bill or first class train tickets or meals at la gavroche?

Its claiming for items that you have not recieved. people are printing off their own invoices for meals and accomodation with a fake VAT registration. A quick check via the auditing tool (We use I.D.E.A) identifies the vat number and business. Thereafter we ask the business (ocassionally) for a copy invoice and compare it to see if there is an extra zero, or if it actually existed.This is standard pre-audit work.Police are called in as it is theft, and a criminal offence.Hope that helps.Taxman

Wow ok, well if people are doing that I feel much less guilty for letting a personal call slip onto my corp phone bill last month!

Sounds like plain old fashioned theft to me. Quite right the police should be involved.Thieves like that reflect badly on the rest of us.I've worked for one of the Big4 advisory firms and a number of others in recent years, and I'd have to say that the Big4 firm was very weak on expense control. The attitude seemed to be to charge whatever we could get away with billing back to the client. The net result is that some staff will abuse this, and push the boundary until we get into straightforward fraud, like you describe above.

Sounds like plain old fashioned theft to me. Quite right the police should be involved.Thieves like that reflect badly on the rest of us.I've worked for one of the Big4 advisory firms and a number of others in recent years, and I'd have to say that the Big4 firm was very weak on expense control. The attitude seemed to be to charge whatever we could get away with billing back to the client. The net result is that some staff will abuse this, and push the boundary until we get into straightforward fraud, like you describe above.

Sounds like plain old fashioned theft to me. Quite right the police should be involved.Thieves like that reflect badly on the rest of us.I've worked for one of the Big4 advisory firms and a number of others in recent years, and I'd have to say that the Big4 firm was very weak on expense control. The attitude seemed to be to charge whatever we could get away with billing back to the client. The net result is that some staff will abuse this, and push the boundary until we get into straightforward fraud, like you describe above.

I used to work for a bank where we discovered widespread abuse of corporate credit cards. The stuff we found was unbelievable - shopping sprees, iTunes, even one guy who had been on eBay to the tune of about £3000. Quite a few people got sacked, but what was surprising was how much people denied it when the evidence was right there. I think a lot of people think 'big company, make me work too hard, I'm just getting them back a bit'.

Can someone forward this old thread to the Houses of Parliament?

I have been in the business 17 years and only once have I heard of expense fiddling. A guy travelling back late on a Friday night took his family out for dinner at Pizza Hut. Next week he put it through his expenses and his boss never checked his expenses