Two Fridays ago, our district attended a regional conference at a suburban convention center that involved several districts. The following Monday, my boss gave me the pleasant news that we could submit a request for reimbursement for our travel costs. Sweet, right? All I had to do was fill out a single sheet and get a check. What could go wrong?
Acquiring the Form: I figured the forms would be in the office, so I went to the main office to get one. I asked the receptionist, and she didn’t know. I went to the next person, but she is in charge of attendance, so that isn’t her area. I went to the next person, and she told me that reimbursement was a district matter and not a school matter, so she sent me to the other end of the school to the district office. I asked the Superintendent’s Secretary who shunted me to the next cubicle. Unfortunately, that lady is in charge of payroll, so she shunted me to a 3rd cubicle because that covers expenditures. The lady was not in. So, I came back to my office and sent an email requesting a reimbursement form. Two days later, it was in my mailbox.
Submitting the Form: I filled out the mileage and tolls, totaled it up, signed it, and put it in the appropriate mailbox. A day later, the form is in my box with a sticky note. “This must be approved by the principal.” First of all, the principal isn’t even my boss, the Director of Technology is my boss. Secondly, we went to all the trouble of bringing the scanning equipment to the conference and setting it up through their WiFi so that everyone could scan in electronically. Therefore, there was no question regarding who was there and who was not. Therefore, his official approval was redundant at best. But, okay, I put it in his mailbox.
A day later, it was back in my mailbox again with a note. “You must have a Google map with a route printout with mileage.” Okay, fine. I did the process, printed out the sheet, stapled it to the reimbursement form, and put it in his mailbox.
A day later, it was back in my mailbox AGAIN. “You must have a printout of the toll receipt for the $1.00 toll reimbursement that you are requesting.” The printed route included “I-294: Tri-State Tollway”. That’s TOLLWAY. Wouldn’t that mean that I would have to pay at least one toll going and one toll coming back?! That’s all I requested, one puny dollar for one toll going and one toll coming back, for fuck’s sake! I wrote under his note: “This is becoming way more trouble than it’s worth.” On the sheet, I crossed out the dollar and adjusted the total to reflect one dollar less and then put it in his mailbox AGAIN.
It hasn’t even reached reimbursement yet. God only knows what horrors await me there. Suffice it to say that I dread checking my mail tomorrow.
I attended a conference last October. My College operates on the “well, why don’t you pay for it and we’ll reimburse ya later – k?”
I had all of my receipts in order except for the receipt from the conference registration fee ($395.00). Our accounts office wouldn’t accept the short confirmation email I got from the conference planner as proof of payment and despite numerous emails the planner wouldn’t respond with a .pdf of the more detailed reg receipt.
This went on for two months. I finally “borrowed” the Conference’s logo, cut and pasted the earlier email receipt they had sent me into a Word document, and fancied it up a bit with a “totals” line, etc (and for the amount paid, of course – no monkey business). I submitted this paperwork and was reimbursed very quickly. My work BFF, who is very much a rule follower, was, three weeks later still trying to rouse the conference planner for a receipt our Accounting would accept. I offered my “receipt”; she was terrified of getting caught but I reminded her that we did pay for the conference, the outlay for her registration was sitting in her credit card balance and she was paying interest on it whilst we played this silly game. A week later she borrowed my “receipt” and was promptly reimbursed.
This has become my goto process as well. Need a receipt? No problem, I have a printer. Need a signature? No problem, there are sites online that generate them in any style.
I work for a university system, and I sometimes wonder if the budget shortfalls in education aren’t at least partly attributable to all the different people who apparently need to be involved in any claim for reimbursement. It sometimes seems like there are a dozen administrative employees for every actual faculty member in our university system, and at least half of those seem to spend most of their lives moving the same pieces of paper back and forth to one another.
Before you can even claim for driving expenses in our system, you have to take an online defensive driving course. This is strictly a waste-of-time, cover-their-ass procedure. You can pass it with almost no knowledge of good driving habits, and it does absolutely nothing to ensure that the person who has taken the test is competent on the road. All it does is eat up 30 to 40 minutes of your time, and probably also cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in tech personnel to set up.
Same for things like the online sexual harassment course we’re all required to take every couple of years. Again, it doesn’t actually do anything, and it certainly doesn’t do anything to turn a sexual predator into a responsible employee, but it helps the university avoid liability if and when someone actually does commit sexual misconduct.
I once turned in a reimbursement request and heard nothing back. Finally after three months I sent a hey, what’s up email and got a response that someone would check on it. Crickets
Month 4, lather, rinse, repeat.
Month 5, ditto.
Month 6. Sorry, you submitted your request on the old form, please fill out this new form and resubmit.
While I didn’t compare the forms with a fine tooth comb, the only difference I could find was the revision date at the bottom which was a couple of weeks before the original submission. I did refrain from asking them why they couldn’t have told me this when I first submitted it or even send out a general notice that there was a new form when it was released.
The money itself wasn’t really an issue because all the actual charges were on a company card. All I was getting was the meal per diem for a couple of weeks which just goes into the slush fund. But damn.
Among the multitude of administrative things my university does wrong, reimbursement is one they get right. Submit the form with email printouts or original receipts, a couple signatures, two weeks later I get a check.
Accounting departments are populated by strange birds. They and I never got along because I’m the exact opposite of a by-the-book paperclip mentality.
Among my various run-ins with them was the concept of per diem for meals. I was fine with it, but on extended trips I would be in the habit of eating cheaply for the most part and often not even submitting the costs, then having a luxurious expensive meal once in a while. So according to my expense submission my meal costs would look like I was living out of a dumpster all week, and then having a super expensive meal on the weekend. But all they saw was the super expensive meal. The fact that the daily average was less than the per diem didn’t matter. What mattered was that the nattering old hens in the accounting department had never had meals like that in their lives, and they were damned if they were going to pay for mine.
This happened over and over again and the result was always the same. They always paid, but my manager was required to come and whine at me, which he did only halfheartedly, because, like me, he could do arithmetic.
If it was like the driving course we were required to take, it was one they signed up for off the shelf, and wasn’t that expensive per person. It might have come bundled with other courses, too. We were all required to take the driving course because the city’s insurance had gone up and they needed everyone qualified to check out a city pool vehicle (in other words, everybody) to take the course to get it to go down. I’m guessing that your guys get an insurance break, too.
Oh, and ours was online, so it tallied up who had taken it automatically. That way any managerial nagging that needed to be done could be done efficiently, without every department’s admin having to turn in a tally.
My sympathies to Jasmine and anyone else who has to request reimbursements.
Jennshark, I like the cut of your jib!
I make travel and reimbursement arrangements for several people and it’s a constant aching pain in the ass. Even after the checks have gone out, it’s never fucking over. Six months down the road, they’ll do an audit and decide they need one more piece of documentation that of course is impossible to get by that time. Travel, I hates it!
I had a travel reimbursement FedEx-ed back to me from Corporate once because I had an airport parking receipt that had not been taped onto an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. How hard would it have been for someone to just tape it to a sheet of paper for me? Nope, send it back with a cover letter explaining what was wrong, plus the expense of overnighting it back and forth. Talk about lazy and wasteful.
Ha! I was once stuck in expense report purgatory for nearly six months because of a 4 Euro discrepancy due to some mystery non-itemized tax on a Germany rail pass purchased through a third party travel service.
Travel finance department refused to reimburse, eventually threatening me with reprimand action up to and including termination.
I eventually started keeping weekly logs that I sent to my boss with “4 Euro” in one column, and “Time spent” x “Hourly wage” x “Number of Persons Involved” in another column, titled “Is this really worth it?” in the header.
It eventually made our VP at the top of my chain angry enough to yell at the travel expense VP and get it to disappear
I paid for a course $1000.00 out of pocket in order to save my company 50%, they reimbursed me on my paycheck. The HR person didn’t understand why I had a problem with them taking income tax out of my reimbursement and adding it to my income. So she changed it to something different on my paycheck so no taxes were taken out but it was still being counted as income. It took about a month of messed up income checks before she finally asked someone how to set it up so I got reimbursed for my money without it being part of my paycheck.
Many times I’ve put my previous career in the 1990s as a graphic designer to use. Forging, or as I prefer to call it “expediting bureaucratic shitwork” is amazingly easy today with computers. Back in the day it was cut 'n paste and copy and scan.
I must emphasize that I’ve never used my mad skillz for evil, just for cutting through stupid bullshit.
On company cars: the college has a fleet of ancient Ford Turds that are at least 15-years-old and not maintained. I’m not even sure they have AC or radios. We can take their driver’s test and pay for gas with the campus credit card or drive a personal car and be (eventually) reimbursed for mileage.
Um, yeah, as much as I’d like to swagger down I-95 in an unsafe rustbucket, I’ll be driving my BMW to the conference in Baltimore.
And don’t get me started on sexual harassment and diversity training. Here’s an idea, Dear Campus: identify the 11 people who are screwing their students and saying awful things in the classroom (everyone knows who they are) and make THEM do the trainings. Don’t waste the time of people who know how to not be idiots.
The toll receipt is mind-boggling. What if it’s on a highway where you can only use a transponder??? This is where a human ought to be able to use common sense and say “no receipt needed”.
Hell, even submitting expenses for a Federal client (and I think as a Federal employee) there are certain small expenses that do not require a receipt, and that 1.00 toll would have been one of them.
I think there must be some unwritten rule where the accounting people are subtly encouraged to throw crap like this back at you in the hopes that you’ll eventually give up.
Not quite the same thing, but about a week ago I got a nasty email from our Corporate Counsel reminding me that I had not taken the online course for business ethics that was mandatory for all employees. He of course put everyone who didn’t take the course on the same email, including several VPs and the CEO’s administrative assistant.
The email said that if I did not take the course by April 30th, access to all company systems may be taken away.
I filed that email with the one I got last April and ignored as well.
I solve this issue by never ever allowing any company to use my funds to pay for their business expenses. I’m not a bank, and I have no interest in providing my employer with an interest free loan. I simply repeat the line “My budget does not allow that” until they give me petty cash or a company credit card.
Back in the day, companies I worked with never had any problems like this. Once I asked for a massage to be reimbursed — the only question accounting had was how to report this to IRS.
I never abused the expenses though. Some did. There was one field engineer with a company-issued IATA credit card who had a nervous breakdown and hopped on PanAm Flight 1, or whatever it was, and went round and round and round until someone put a stop to him. :eek:
Many years ago I worked for what was then a “Big Eight” accounting firm. Audit people often worked for weeks at a time at a client’s location, and the firm quite naturally paid their laundry expenses. One Audit Manager would take the draperies from his house with him to the client’s location so he could have them cleaned on the company’s dime. Naturally, he was fired.
I worked with a guy in 2001 who was laid off from our company. Of course, he submitted his final expense report. For $60,000.
Turns out he had been putting flights, hotels, customer dinners, and more on his personal credit card for some number of years, so he could get the points. He had receipts for it all. Our manager tried to figure out if he could not pay some of it, but in the end they reimbursed the whole thing.
