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Asset Misappropriation
Find the pattern hidden across thousands of ordinary-looking transactions.
Asset misappropriation is the most common form of occupational fraud and one of the most difficult to document thoroughly. Whether it involves skimming cash receipts, billing schemes through fictitious vendors, payroll fraud, or unauthorized expense reimbursements, the evidence is often buried across thousands of transactions that look unremarkable in isolation. The pattern only becomes visible when the data is analyzed as a whole.
Sedra Solutions gives fraud examiners the analytical power to surface those patterns quickly, follow the money trails through hidden connections, and build the documented evidentiary record needed to support disciplinary action, civil recovery, or criminal referral.
90%
of cases in the ACFE’s 2026 study involved asset misappropriation, the most common form of occupational fraud. The typical scheme runs about 12 months before detection, and 84% of fraudsters show behavioral or transactional red flags.
Source: ACFE Occupational Fraud 2026: A Report to the Nations (2,402 cases, 143 countries)
Why fraud examiners choose Sedra
Key benefits
Disbursement and billing scheme detection
Automatically flag transactions that match the signature patterns of fictitious vendor schemes, duplicate payments, altered payee fraud, and unauthorized disbursements — including transactions deliberately structured to fall below approval thresholds.
Payroll fraud analysis
Identify ghost employees, unauthorized pay rate changes, excessive overtime patterns, and commission manipulation by analyzing payroll data against HR records and transaction histories.
Expense reimbursement review
Rapidly analyze employee expense submissions at scale to detect duplicate claims, personal expenses submitted as business costs, and unusual spending patterns that warrant further investigation.
Cash receipt reconciliation
Trace income at a granular level to identify skimming schemes, lapping arrangements, and discrepancies between recorded revenue and actual deposits — even when records have been altered or are incomplete.
Defensible documentation
Every finding is reproducible and traceable to the underlying data, giving you a clear methodology to stand behind when presenting results to management, counsel, audit committees, or in court.
Proof from practice
In a Sedra case study, a five-analyst team spent roughly 550 hours on data collection, organization and standardization. With Sedra, that work took about 56 hours, a 90% reduction.
Related resources
Buyer's guide
Evaluating financial investigation tools?
Our Buyer’s Guide covers how automated solutions address the biggest pain points in financial investigations, the features to look for at every stage from data ingestion to reporting, and best practices for evaluating tools and vendors.
FAQs
Frequently asked questions
How does Sedra help detect fictitious vendor and duplicate payment schemes?
Sedra standardizes disbursement data and flags transactions that match the patterns of fictitious vendors, duplicate payments, altered payees, and payments structured below approval thresholds. The examiner reviews each flag and decides what it means.
Can Sedra increase recovery of assets?
Yes. Sedra traces money flows and identifies hidden connections through intermediaries, helping you follow the trail of truth and recover more assets.
Does Sedra replace the examiner’s judgment?
No. Sedra is AI-augmented. It surfaces patterns and connections faster, and the credentialed examiner determines what they mean and stands behind the conclusions.
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• Asset Misappropriation (this page)