Field forces of medical reps, conference and CME attendance, clinical-trial site visits, pharma travel is a long tail of small bookings, almost impossible to reconcile by hand and easy to write off. The write-off is the mistake.
Not through big misses, through ten thousand small ones, none of which ever justified anyone's afternoon.
No single ticket looks worth chasing, a rep's hop here, a CME flight there. It's only in aggregate, across hundreds of travellers and thousands of trips, that the unclaimed GST becomes a real number.
Reps book one way, HQ another, event teams a third, CRAs a fourth. The documentation trail fragments before it ever reaches finance, and reassembling it by hand never makes anyone's priority list.
Pharma finance fights heavier compliance wars than this. Travel GST is precisely the kind of leak that persists because it never deserves the attention it would take to fix manually.
One quarter of field travel, sorted by ticket value. Every bar is a booking; the gold ones carry unclaimed GST. Individually invisible. Watch the sum.
The leak is invisible per ticket and substantial per yearthat's what makes it a systems problem, not a diligence problem.
Roughly 8% GST sits on every domestic air ticket. Multiply by a field force, by a conference calendar, by a trial programme, the tail stops being small.
Book a free reconciliation review, one quarter of field travel is usually all it takes to see the number.