The Top 7 ways Employees Misuse Fuel Cards

4 years ago in Houston, a company noticed that their fuel bill was $3,000-$4,000 more than usual and had been for months. Concerned, the company manager began to look into the matter and traced the source of the additional costs to an employee’s fuel card. When confronted by the manager, the employee admitted to using his fuel card to fill up his friend’s and family’s cars for cash over the course of several months. All in all, the employee stole over $18,000 in fuel before he was discovered and arrested on aggregate theft charges. However, had the company been more aware of the ways that fuel cards can be misused then that $18,000 loss could’ve been prevented.

To keep yourself from falling victim to employee fuel card misuse, you first need to understand how employees can take advantage of your fuel card program and ways you can prevent these common tactics.

In what is to follow, we will discuss the ways in which fuel cards are most commonly misused and provide solutions for how to best prevent misuse, as well as asset loss going forward.

Perhaps the simplest yet most effective way an employee can misuse company fuel cards is to purchase an extra transaction a couple times per month to fuel their personal vehicle. When reviewing invoices it will probably get lost in the mix with the other transactions.

The Solution: Set up fuel card purchase alerts to automatically come to your email immediately after every transaction. This will help you identify when a driver is improperly using their fuel cards.

Check Out This Article For A Complete List of Fuel Card Controls

In order to get around being caught stealing fuel through multiple recorded transactions, an employee may find it safer to make just one large transaction. By leaving the pump on, an employee can fill both company and personal tanks while only making one transaction. Which doesn’t raise any eyebrows, or implicate any wrongdoing.

The Solution: Enact a gallon limit on fuel cards to inhibit the driver’s ability to leave the pump on.

Another, more subtlemployees may misuse company fuel cards for their personal use is by using them on their personal time. Rather than making multiple transactions in a short amount of time, or making one large transaction employees may decide that all they want is a free tank of gas every once in a while. As a result, employees may use their fuel cards after work to fill their vehicles as well as their families’ and friend’s.

The Solution: Limit your card’s functionality to your company’s operating hours by instituting a time of day and day of week control.

Perhaps even more subtle than a single personal tank of gas, company fuel cards may be used to make non-fuel purchases i.e. drinks, snacks and other C-store items at certain cardlocks. Small money in the immediate to be sure, but over time purchases of this kind are sure to add up and cost a company considerable amounts of money.

The Solution: To prevent this, employers should contact their card provider and discuss enacting a product control limit on their cards.

Applying PIN # controls to fuel cards is a fairly common practice that allows employers to track employees’ fuel purchases. However, by sharing PIN #’s employees may render this control useless and leave their employer without an accurate record of purchases. This opens the door for theft. Without an effective control in place to help determine who purchased what, employees can spread theft across several purchases so that it becomes nearly undetectable.

The Solution: Set up each driver with their own personal profile, outfitted with their own personal PIN with instructions not to share them with anyone.

Employees come and go, and so too do their fuel card profiles. Sometimes though, employers forget to deactivate their employee’s cards and are surprised to see a series of transactions at the end of the month from someone they thought they’d removed from their payroll.

The Solution: Immediately following the firing or resignation of an employee, an employer should call their card providers and request an account deactivation.

Finally, fuel cards are from time to time stolen by employees or by persons outside of the company often for the purpose of being resold.

The Solution: To prevent this, an employer should always keep a close eye on his purchasing receipts and call the company’s card provider immediately after recognizing any evidence of card theft.