Corporate cards play a key role in companies’ control of travel spend – but how is this role evolving? Amon Cohen investigates
ans of stories about outrageous expense fiddles committed by people with enough money already may care to Google the name
Christopher Grierson. In case you missed him, Grierson was the eminent City solicitor and former runner-up for Lawyer of the Year who pleaded
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guilty in March to falsely claiming £1.27 million in travel expenses. Grierson pleaded guilty to submitting 57 fake travel invoices over a four-year period. In spite of earning £830,000 annually as a partner with the law firm Hogan Lovells, his scam enabled him to trouser an average £6,000 a week on top in made-up expenses.
The Grierson case is an extreme one, but it proves yet again why it is worth businesses investing in some auditing processes to check how much employees spend on travel – and where, and why. Controlling costs is one of the five primary strategic objectives of a company travel programme that, in a recently