There are many ways to overstate travel costs. Employees can pad their travel claims. They can take unnecessary trips because they like to travel or need to build their airline miles to get preferred boarding and “free” class upgrades, or have other personal reasons. Employees can claim and charge off to the government higher than prescribed lodging and per diem maximums because of poor internal controls or because no one wants to challenge the claim of a person in authority. They can easily game the system requiring lowest available air fares. And so on. Most of these intrusions can be minimized with effective internal control systems. But what if the owners of a company are doing the padding? That’s what a company called Para-Plus Translations was doing. And they got caught. Got turned in by a whistleblower.
Source: PNWC’s Government Contracting Update: How Are Your Internal Controls Over Employee Travel Costs?
