Tracking Travel to OFAC Countries

[LCameron]

As a global nonprofit organization, our staff will travel overseas to developing countries to work on issues to improve health; sometimes this involves travel to an OFAC country.  OFAC or the Office of Foreign Assets Control administers and enforces sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security.   There is a List of OFAC Countries that is updated periodically by OFAC that is checked.

For insurance purposes, we need to track and report Travel to OFAC Countries.  Does anyone else track Travel to OFAC Countries in Concur and if so how?

Thanks,

Lorna Cameron
Task Force for Global Health

[Josh]

Hi Lorna,

Would tagging each travel expense as OFAC-related and then running a report to show all tagged expenses within a given month be an appropriate approach?

My company deals a lot with government grants, and we have a specific range in a segment in our chart of accounts that is set aside for grants. We then have some custom-built reports that we run monthly that will show any expenses coded to a specific grant.

Depending on the requirements of reporting to the OFAC, you may just be able to do that. Instruct your employees to use a specific value in one of your Cost Tracking fields for each travel expense to an OFAC country, build a custom report in Cognos, and then run the report however often you need to. You'd be able to organize the report by either another Cost Tracking field like branch or department, employee name, type of payment, etc., and run it for any given set of dates.

With our grant reporting, we had to follow certain guidelines (e.g. reporting expenses based on incurred date versus paid date), so you may want to check to make sure your report is set up appropriately.

Does that sound like a solution? Not sure if there are any nuances that would cause that process to not work for you, but I thought I'd share our solution to a kind of similar situation. Hope this helps!

[patilr1982]

Hi LCameron,

It would depend on the kind of information that is available in your setup. Travel reports would be an ideal starting point for those using Concur Travel.

If you make use of standard Travel allowance, the Itineraries are a great source to determine who was where for how long. Else, we would look at report start and end dates in combination with primary destination indicated on the report.

Requests also allow for reporting of potential locations. However, we have to consider this information with some doubt as changed plans may not reflect in Concur.

Relying on expense entry location also may not be ideal as sometimes these are misleading

e.g. a lot of uber transactions are recorded in credit card provider systems as originating in Amsterdam or international flight booking may show location to be a domestic one.

[sasrsc]

I suppose the first question is:

Are you trying to reach them post booking but prior to arrival (in which case any Expense reporting would be useless).

If you are trying to reach them prior to travel then wouldn't the TMC be the first avenue to support this. I would think any TMC should easily be able to program a daily batch email that sends you an email of any upcoming trips to a list of countries that you specify.

Do you use Intl SOS? If so, you can always query their travel tracker. Alternatively they could send you emails with upcoming travel to certain countries. 

We don't use much/any of the Concur Travel Reports because we pull down the data via API into our own database and then report from that which allows us to do whatever we want/need. This approach isn't typical but we're an Analytics firm so it's in our blood.