Corporate gift card rewards programs lose millions to employee embezzlement annually

Companies routinely purchase bulk gift cards for employee rewards, sales incentives, and customer thank-yous. The procurement and distribution process is rife with fraud: an HR or admin employee orders 200 $100 Amazon gift cards, skims 20 for personal use, and no one notices because gift card inventories are rarely audited at the individual card level. The company sees a $20,000 line item for 'employee rewards' and approves it. Unlike expense report fraud (where receipts are scrutinized), gift card purchases look legitimate by nature -- they are supposed to be given away. The fraud often continues for years because the amounts are small per incident and buried in large department budgets. When companies do discover the theft, recovery is nearly impossible because the gift cards have already been redeemed. US businesses lose an estimated $50 billion per year to employee theft broadly, and gift cards are one of the hardest channels to audit because they lack the paper trail of wire transfers or check payments. This persists because most corporate expense management systems (Expensify, Concur, Brex) have no special controls for gift card purchases -- they are treated as generic office supplies.