The $1.7 Trillion Blind Spot: Why Your Travel Expense Reports Are a Legal Liability

Tony Ridley, MSc, CSyP, FSyI, SRMCP. Originally published 6 August 2026.

Corporate travel expense reports are reconciled to the cent, audited by finance and archived with total precision. The corresponding safety record, showing what hazards were identified before a trip was approved, who evaluated them and why the trip went ahead, typically does not exist. This piece examines that asymmetry: organisations that measure spending in exhaustive detail while measuring traveller harm at no resolution at all, and what that gap means the moment a traveller is injured or killed on a work trip.

The analysis draws on the legal framework courts and coroners apply when a workplace harm is investigated, on the commercial and government products organisations currently lean on as a substitute for genuine risk assessment, and on how corporate travel budgets are actually built and defended. It asks what a truly defensible, prospective and traceable travel risk assessment looks like, and why a tracking platform, an insurance policy or a static annual policy do not, on their own, satisfy a board's non-delegable duty of care.

For directors, executives and travel risk professionals, the piece sets out why the financial record an organisation is proudest of can be the very document that establishes liability, and what has to sit alongside it before the next trip is approved.

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