abstract

Building a real-time travel & expense compliance and risk analytics framework

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THE CLIENT

A Virginia-based pharmaceutical company with approximately $1.5 billion in annual revenue needed to move beyond periodic manual sampling of Travel & Expense (T&E) transactions to a continuous, analytics-driven compliance model covering the full population of spend.

THE OUTCOME

The organization achieved 100% transaction coverage with continuous, automated monitoring of T&E compliance. Policy violations and fraud risks are now detected daily while audit readiness is maintained as an ongoing state, and the internal audit team operates from data rather than samples.

WHY WAS IT DIFFICULT

The internal audit team relied on manual sampling, which left the majority of transactions unreviewed. Policy violations and fraudulent activity occurring outside the sampled population went undetected. Fragmented source systems provided no unified daily view of T&E activity, and continuous control monitoring was not operationally feasible without an automated foundation.

THE ENGINEERING JOURNEY

The team consolidated T&E data from multiple source systems into a unified data layer with daily ingestion and processing, implemented continuous control monitoring to enforce policy adherence across 100% of transactions, developed risk and fraud detection analytics to identify anomalies and flag policy violations in near real-time, and built dashboards and data flow architecture diagrams to support ongoing monitoring and audit reporting.

KEY DECISIONS

In-house domain expertise in T&E compliance was embedded directly into the detection logic and accelerators, enabling the solution to be built for scale rather than manual annual cycles. Continuous control monitoring was designed as the operating model from the outset, not added as an afterthought.

MEASURABLE IMPACT

  • 100% transaction coverage: Every T&E transaction monitored continuously, not sampled
  • Zero fraud leakage: Policy violations and fraud risks detected through automated daily controls
  • Improved governance: Transparency and audit readiness maintained as an ongoing operational state
  • Reduced manual effort: Shift from periodic manual audits to continuous automated compliance