Auditing Additional Living Expense Documentation

Research question and scope

The question is whether an additional living expense ledger can be reconstructed from its receipts, dates, occupants, and categories without relying on the preparer's memory. The unit is a ledger row tied to a receipt or a documented exception.

The protocol does not test whether an expense was reasonable, whether a limit was correctly applied, or whether the household was entitled to payment. Those determinations belong to the adjuster and are not inferred from documentation completeness.

Population and ledger export

Define the population from a fixed ledger export for a stated claim and date range. Record the export time, the columns included, the receipt count, and the rule for rows without receipts. Include rows marked unclassified, disputed, and missing evidence rather than sampling only clean submissions.

Reconcile the export row count with the receipt index before drawing a sample. If the ledger has 84 rows and the receipt folder has 79 files, the five-row difference is part of the finding, not a reason to exclude the rows.

Measures and coding rules

Code each row for receipt presence, merchant name, amount legibility, date, category, occupant, and stay address where applicable. Add a flag for rows whose receipt amount differs from the ledger amount. Define how a split receipt, a combined folio, or a bank statement substitute will be treated.

For lodging, code check-in and check-out dates and the number of nights separately from the receipt total. For meals and mileage, code the stated purpose and the number of people or miles. A row can be complete for one measure and missing for another; do not collapse them into a single pass or fail.

Sampling and agreement

Stratify by category, month, amount band, and evidence status. Oversample rows with no receipt and rows near a stated limit so the audit describes the difficult part of the ledger. Preserve the random seed and the replacement log.

Two reviewers should code a calibration set of at least 25 rows. Calculate agreement by measure, not only overall. Where reviewers disagree about whether a bank statement substitutes for a receipt, the definition needs revision before the main pass.

Analysis and limitations

Report completeness rates with denominators, the distribution of missing evidence by category, and the count of amount or date mismatches. Do not report a single completeness percentage that hides a category with almost no receipts.

The audit cannot establish that a stay was necessary or that a meal was reasonable. Receipts may be lost, households may have moved between hotels, and a ledger may have been prepared after the fact. These limits should appear beside the findings.

Privacy and replication

Ledger rows can reveal where a family slept and what they ate. Use a restricted working copy, redact merchant and address detail in the report, and retain only the minimum fields needed to reproduce the coding.

Keep the export query, receipt index, codebook, sample seed, reviewer notes, and adjudications. A second reviewer should be able to rebuild the counts without contacting the household or opening the claim system.

Method note

We reviewed public consumer guidance on homeowners insurance and internal-control principles, then converted them into ledger evidence checks. No household files or payment records were examined.