What You’re Not Catching: 10 Hidden Audit Risks in T&E and P-Card Spend

Compliance Isn’t a Checkbox.  

On the surface, most enterprise finance teams appear well-armed against non-compliance. Policies are published. Workflows are digitized. Periodic audits are checked off the list. But spend data doesn’t lie—and it tells a different story.  

Travel & Expense (T&E) and Purchase Card (P-Card) programs, specifically, are filled with opportunities for errors and lapses in compliance. The speed, decentralization and sheer volume of these transactions make them especially vulnerable to mistakes, abuse and policy drift. And despite having systems in place, the risks often go undetected—not because they’re complex, but because they’re hidden in plain sight.

At Oversight, we analyze millions of T&E and P-Card transactions across large enterprises every week. What we uncover is a consistent pattern: the same compliance blind spots cropping up again and again, quietly eroding integrity, efficiency and budgets.  

Why Traditional Controls Aren’t Enough 

T&E and P-Card automation systems were built for convenience, not control. Policy enforcement is often reactive and compliance reviews are sampled at best. Fraud detection?  Even more difficult to deliver. When multiple systems don’t talk to each other—or when exception handling is done offline—problems cash leaks multiply.  

Most of these issues aren’t intentional. They're caused by process gaps, misaligned systems or unclear policies. But the result is the same: audit risk, wasted spend, and employee frustration. 

The Risks We See Every Day

Here are 10 of the most common, high-impact audit issues we help uncover in enterprise T&E and P-Card programs:

• Duplicate payments across systems – One item is paid via P-Card and then reimbursed again through expense claims or accounts payables processes.
• Split transactions – Large purchases are divided into smaller ones to skirt around  approval thresholds.
• Receipt laundering – Generic or unrelated receipts – or fake AI generated receipts -- submitted to justify out-of-policy expenses.
• Weekend or holiday travel misuse – Personal trips disguised as business, often blended with legitimate expenses.
• Non-compliant merchant categories – Spend in flagged categories like luxury goods or entertainment.
• Cash equivalents – Gift cards and prepaid items that bypass controls.
• Low-dollar repeat violations – Individually insignificant but collectively damaging.
• Duplicate reimbursement of pre-paid items – Items already covered by internal travel booking tools get claimed again.
• Round-dollar claims – Repeated claims for neat figures that often suggest fabrication.
• Untracked exception resolution – Email-based follow-ups that leave no audit trail.

The Compounding Cost of Staying Manual

None of these issues may break the bank individually. But over time, they compound—silently eating away at your budget and compliance posture. They increase audit times, reduce recovery potential, and ultimately undermine confidence in your financial processes.   

Audit and compliance today isn’t just about catching fraud. It’s about preventing leakage, reinforcing policy, and building scalable, trusted systems.

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