Fuel cards

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

We find it works very well for us, but we only have one vehicle which is driven by lots of people, but only ever on business, no personal use at all.

So the fuel card stays with the vehicle, and the receipts are returned to the office to tally with the monthly invoice.

We used to run the same system, but got knocked badly by a rogue employee. :mad:

The problem was that there was no proper checks on who was actually using the card (there's no signature for the cashier to check on the back of card as its designed to be used by any employee) - they only check the vehicle registration number.

One (now ex-) employee spent £10 on a cheap set of duplicate number plates which she used in conjunction with the fuel card to regularly fill up her own vehicle.

It only came to light when we noticed the company vehicle allegedly used quite a lot of fuel in a week we knew the vehicle was actually off-road, being repaired at a garage.
That brought our attention to the apparent fact that the company vehicle was generally very uneconomic, or we had some extemely heavy footed people driving it.

But it was very difficult to identify the culprit, and meanwhile we had to continue to pay the fuel card company.

Police were involved, and they tried to get CCTV from garages, but by the time we got the monthly bill identifying where the card was used, the garages involved had already wiped their CCTV footage - many only seem to have it on a 7 day revolving cycle.

Of course, this woman was signing for fuel, but it was always a fake signature, and as I say the petrol stations used had no way to check that signature.

It was only after a few months investigative work by ourselves in conjunction with our local CID that the real cuplrit was identified. The fuel card company were no assistence whatsoever.

We identified 2 possible local garages where we believed the fuel card may have been used fraudulently on a regular basis, and the police arranged to download & collect CCTV footage every week for a period of two months from those garages. Eventually there was a good enough image captured of this woman, an employee of ours at the time, driving a totally different vehicle but with the registration number of our company vehicle.

It seems when police went a-knocking at the suspects door, inside her vehicle were found the false plates, and we were told there was a simple device attached to the proper vehicle number plates where the false plates could be quickly applied/released over the existing correct plates.

I can't say much more as the matter is still subject to criminal action against the now ex-employee.

What I will say is that we no longer use a fuel card on the advice of the police, but ask employees to remit personal expense reports for any fuel they purchase. That way, we can easily identify who is spending what of the companies money.