Helping Managers Be Successful

When hearing or reading about cases of internal card fraud, a natural question is, “Why didn’t the cardholder’s manager catch this?” When fraud of any kind—Commercial Card, expense report or other—goes undetected, it is easy to blame the employee’s manager. However, while managers’ lack of oversight is often a factor, we should dig deeper. Do organizations set up their managers for success or failure?

Manager Hurdles

  • The manager is on overload, juggling too many other responsibilities.

  • The manager is responsible for too many employees. We can debate how many is too many, but try to determine how long it takes to review one cardholder’s monthly transactions thoroughly. Multiply by a manager’s number of cardholders to get a sense of the commitment. 

    Most organizations enforce a monthly deadline by which managers must complete the expense review process. While the intent is to hold managers accountable for their important role in fraud detection, the downside is hurried sign-offs without attention to detail. Approaches like this can be a matter of manager survival.

  • The manager resides in a different location than the cardholder and might be out of touch with an employee’s daily activities, unable to recognize fraudulent expenses.

  • The organization does not require any related training or provide any helpful tools.

Are organizations drowning their managers or providing the necessary support for survival and success?

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Helping Managers Be Successful

The following tips reflect a combination of widely used best practices, as well as lesser-used strategies.

  1. Pursue senior management involvement in communicating the importance of the manager’s role, so they hear it from the top.

  2. Specifically design training for managers; make it relevant. While they need to understand the cardholder’s role, too, they do not need to learn the same details. 

  3. Require managers to sign an internal agreement like cardholders.

  4. Mandate annual training on card policies, as well as ensure managers are trained on red flag behaviors that could indicate fraud.

  5. Require cardholders to provide key information for each charge. “Car rental for business trip” is too vague. “Car rental for August 31 meeting in NY with ABC Company” is much better.

  6. Utilize electronic review tools that managers can access at any time. Yes, some organizations still have a paper-based process, which is more tedious.

  7. Send managers a weekly report of their cardholders’ charges, which might make them more likely to spot oddities and ease the monthly review requirement. They would not be as overwhelmed with seeing a month’s worth of charges for the first time and trying to recall what happened weeks ago.

  8. Provide other reporting, too, such as purchasing  history for the manager’s department.

  9. Offer an at-a-glance reference of what managers should look for when reviewing expenses.