How to Prevent Over-Zealous Auditing

[Jennifer Bell]

People will have different perceptions of what an appropriate expense
is. The system should have a way to filter out people who see
everything as an inappropriate expense, in order to minimize the
number of false ‘red flags’.

Some ideas to deal with this are:

There should be more than one person rating an expense item, with the
idea that the ratings of more ‘vindictive’ people will get averaged
out. Also, after they vote the person could be shown the average
rating of the other people, to give them a chance to self-regulate.

It should be pretty clear that one person consistently rates something
as ‘worse’ than the others… the monitoring system could take this into
account when computing the overall average rating.

People whose votes show no correlation with the others (which would
happen if, for instance, if they were just voting randomly) should be
detected early on. As much as possible, ‘destructive’ users should be
prevented from using the system.

[Scott Hennig]

imdb.com requires a certain volume of ratings until they take a users
rating into account. Meaning that you can go in, sign-up and rate a
movie/tv show and see it reflected immediately. If you are a
registered user and have rated a certain number of movie/shows, they
will then take your rating into account.

They also use some sort of weighted average, but will not disclose how
they weight it: http://www.imdb.com/ratings_explained