What was his rationale for holding back on the expense report?
Once with my old company I made the fateful, horrible mistake of ordering a movie in my hotel room. Well, this was “out of policy” so my hotel receipt was $6.99 out of balance, and I had to wade through the incredibly complicated and underdeveloped “Expense Report intranet site” to try and flag the discrepancy so I could explain that I paid for the movie, and the report itself was no longer out of balance. This took approximately 6 MONTHS before everything was finally cleared up.
6 MONTHS of time wasted with emails, phone calls, resubmitting a flagged expense report, more emails, rinse, repeat. What did I watch to create this agony for myself? The Core.
I was supposed to have an FBI check and be fingerprinted because we might have underage students in our classrooms (ie., high school kids taking a class). This was two years ago, I get reminders every so often that I need to do it.
How about this: if you think I might molest a 17yo, then don’t place them in my fucking class.
What is always amazing to me is that the bean counters don’t seem to realize that the paper chase costs more than the reimbursement
It’s the same mindset that leads people to drive to a gas station 10 miles out of their way to save 3 cents/gallon.
But if it became common knowledge that individual infractions would be overlooked because it cost more to resolve them than the dollar amount of the issue, there would be more people crossing that line. So if spending a hundred to chase ten prevents another two hundred in problems, it’s a good investment.
Good bean counters are about the bottom line.
I’m pretty sure that I can answer this one : since people don’t particularly like to tape a receipt on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper, if they don’t send it back to people who don’t, soon enough nobody will tape their receipt on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper, and whoever is dealing with the receipts will spend most of his work time taping receipts on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I’m pretty sure that the next twenty times, you did or will tape your receipt on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper, and the time the guy took to send it back to you will be largely compensated by the time he won’t spent taping 20 receipts onto 20 8.5x11 sheets of paper during the following months or years. This is in fact very efficient. And sorry, but the lazy party is the one was supposed to do it but didn’t, which would be you.
That’s an issue that I encountered many times : if people can get away with not doing what they’re supposed to do, and can let you do it for them, they will, and you’ll spend your time doing what they were supposed to do instead of doing what you’re supposed to do (which can sometimes take more time/ressources than you would assume). And the only way to prevent this is indeed to systematically send back anything that hasn’t been done properly, even if it would take you three times less time to do it yourself than to send it back to them. I’ve never seen an exception to this rule.
(in fact at some point, and for several years, my job was precisely to verify reimbursement requests, so I’ve been on the other side of the fence from everybody posting in this thread, and as you can easily imagine, I was spending most of my time ranting about how many idiots were seemingly unable to do a task as simple as sending a proper reimbursement request)
I went to an academic conference a few months ago. It was held in a resort town about 2 hours drive from a major airline hub. Flights to ResortTown were about $700, vs $250 for MajorHub, making it about $200 cheaper overall to fly and drive. In addition, due to flight schedules, I could fly out late on the day the conference ended rather than staying an extra night (and thus getting back to work a day earlier, too).
Even though it saved money, I knew the drill and documented the cost and time savings thoroughly (including screen shots) a couple of months ahead of time. Only had to send 2 or 3 extra rounds of email to get approval. A colleague of mine decided to attend the conference a week or so after I did all the leg work. To save even more money for both of our professional fund accounts, she asked to split the car rental and gas costs: worked for me. We ended up flying on exactly the same flights to/from MajorHub, purchased through the same University travel site. So, why exactly did she get read the riot act and eventually need back-up from the departmental vice-chair to get reimbursed?
She didn’t ask permission to save money ahead of time.
Wait, you say, didn’t you already do that? And she took the same flights, so she would have saved the same amount of money, right? She must have gotten in trouble for forgetting to get prior authorization or something, right?
No, she got permission to spend X dollars to fly to ResortTown, but then spent X-$300 instead. Doing the same thing I had approval for. The key, it appears from the email trail my colleague forwarded to me asking “WTAF? Srsly?”, was she didn’t have permission to save money: permission to save money in a particular way is apparently a non-transferable property.
After the dust settled, I cornered a long-time departmental admin to try and determine if there was something else I was missing: was there something different about how our travel funds were administered? was someone worried my colleague and I were secretly using academic funds to pay for a theoretical tryst? was there a new reimbursement person flexing their muscles? No, the admin said with a heavy sigh - it’s just The Way Things Are.
And people wonder why Academics don’t try to save money sometimes… (or folks in Business, Government, etc)
An undergrad teaching assistant friend of mine was getting frustrated at the number of multi-page homework sets he was getting that were missing a staple - a not-insignificant problem when dealing with 5-10 pages per student x 80 students per week (the prof would assign 10-15 problems, then have 2-3 graded). Bob would end up wasting an hour or more each week trying to sort out misplaced sheets. Bob tried in-class announcements to get people to staple everything together. He tried email blasts. He tried signs. He tried cajoling, He tried providing a stapler outside the drop-off box. Then two staplers. At best he got up to about 30% stapled.
Finally Bob could take it no more. He posted a giant NO STAPLE = NO CREDIT sign on the front of the dropoff box.
Over half the class ignored the sign.
Over half the class got no credit on the assignment.
When the students complained en masse to the professor, he was equal parts amused and annoyed: “So, you got multiple warnings to fix your lazy-ass problem and, when you chose not too and got bitten, you…are confused about why that happened? Are you college students or four year olds? Take your lumps and don’t make that mistake again, eh?” [paraphrased…but not much]
The percentage of homework sets that were properly stapled for the remainder of the term? 100.
Y’all just don’t understand what it’s like to be a bureaucrat. Here, straight from renowned bureaucrat Hermes Conrad:
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/fqqyi0/futurama-bureaucrat-s-song
No rationale, just laziness.
OK, I’m going to give a general answer to many of these questions.
First, “bean counters” are very well aware of the cost of a paper chase compared to the amount they’re chasing. They probably know it better than you. And in fact it’s probably much more than you think. But you should keep some things in mind :
- Bean counters are themselves held by very strict rules, that might be legal or edicted by your common employer. Their job is to make sure that these rules are followed. Not doing so might result in them having a difficult conversation with an auditor, or with your common boss, or with the local equivalent of the IRS, or in the worst case scenario, a police officer.
2)Your employers has specific agreements with you. It’s not up to you to decide that you’d rather have another agreement. For instance, in the case of the poster who spared his per diem to treat himself with a fancy dinner once in a while. When I was doing this job, he would have been out of luck. It would have never been paid. So he was rather lucky that in his company, they gave it a pass, and just asked his boss to remind him not to do that again. What the problem, really, you will ask? The problem is that your employer agreed to reimburse you a given amount per day, or per meal, or whatever. He didn’t open a credit line that you can use whenever you want for whatever you want. He didn’t agree to offer you a super nice meal every two days, or a luxurious hotel with hookers and champagne every two months, or a trip to Tahiti with your family every two years instead. Of course, you’re thinking that I’m exaggerating for effect. Which leads me to my next point : - None of you have ever been presented with bills for “massage parlors” in Bangkok in lieu of per diem. Or for a wild party for a whole department paid on the “equipment” budget. You’ve absolutely no idea what people will try to get away with. And that’s when you’re enforcing rules strictly. If you don’t all bets are off. Pretty much every time you give someone a pass, he’ll try again, and will try to push the limit a little further. And not just him. Give a pass to one guy and soon enough 10 will do the same. You think you wouldn’t? Yes, you likely would after having seen your coworkers getting away several times with something you originally wouldn’t have considered doing. Believe me, that’s a totally slippery slope.
4)Very closely related : some people will try anything to game the system, make money out of it, or, lacking this, at least try to spend lavishly or to make totally unnecessary expenses. They’ll get their costly tickets on a major airline reimbursed to buy cattle class on a charter plane and pocket the difference, they’ll have their spouse’s birthday gift paid by the company, they’ll mysteriously charge tips 3 three times the cost of the meal, the dinner with their friends will become a business meeting, they’ll have a taxi waiting for 8 hours because they don’t know when they’ll need it and don’t want to wait, driving will cost them €20/kilometer…
This time, maybe not you. But you can bet that a significant part of the annoying documentation you’re asked to provide is there to prevent this kind of people from pocketing money or advantages at the company’s expense. Whatever “nonsensical” rule you’re asked to abide by is likely in place because at some point someone has figured out a way to game the system, and whatever you’re required to do is intended to prevent this. You don’t think it’s possible in this particular case? Well, maybe you’re right and it’s useless bureaucracy or outdated rules. It happens. But maybe you’re simply not as good at creative thinking as the cheaters. The bean counter tells you “that’s the rule, period” so you assume there’s no sensible reason? Most probably, it’s because he’s neither interested in giving you a “how the system can be gamed” course nor in wasting 10 minutes explaining to you (and the 45 people who asked before you) the how and why. He has actual work to do.
Ah, I think I can add one :
5) In your super-peculiar situation, it would have spared money to do something different than to follow the stupid arbitrary rules. Guess what? Following a general set of rules in all cases probably saves your employer 10000 times the paltry amount that you’re going to save once every two years by bending the rules in super peculiar situations. That’s even assuming that it doesn’t cost more (for instance in work time) to change the procedure than you think you’re sparing. And that there’s no legal or financial risk involved in doing so.
I would bet this falls under my points 1) or 4) . Especially for an institution like an university, which is likely to follow even stricter rules than a private business.
Many years ago I was told that I wasn’t allowed to provide Gatorade for field crews and that they should be buying it out of their per diem. For field work in southern Arizona. In the summer. My first solution to this (inviting the travel admin to the field on the next trip) was rejected out of hand, so I made some bureaucratic friends of my own. Full of creativity and spite, I revised the field safety plan (which could be a whole other thread) to specifically call for “Gatorade or other sports drink” to be available at all times in the field, collected all the required signatures and sent it to the project sponsor as an appendix in a quarterly report. When my next claim was rejected, I pointed to that submission and argued that it was a required expense. A few cases of Gatorade eventually escalated to a meeting with the Head of the Sponsored Projects Office, the Institutional Health and Safety Officer, and the Comptroller.
I was not fired. But the better part of a decade later, all my expense reports still get extra attention.
One of the evilest bosses I’ve had once rejected expenses on a 6-week trip (we could only do the expenses once we were back at our “assigned” base office) because of a missing ticket for something like $6.99; it was for the exact same amount as the 14 tickets for the dinners of the other 14 nights I’d stayed at that hotel, eating in that Boston Market (the only place which didn’t require driving).
…my family used to make a living representing our village in multiple settings, from Parliament to weekly markets… my Dad’s generation is all accountants and lawyers… fuck, one of my uncles did our regional budgetting for twenty years and another one was a fucking IRS-equivalent auditor… honey, I can quote procedures and regulations giving chapter, verse, line and character.
I sent the paperwork back along with a copy of the company’s expenses policy which stated meals did not require tickets if below $25 and asked if he’d like me to start submitting every meal as $24.99. CC to his boss and grandboss (C-level type). Got the signed form back within the hour. Also got him in person asking where had I obtained a copy of the policy, causing a round of snorts since d’uh, we all had it! I’m still trying to understand that concept of “denying people access to policies which apply to them,” but it’s not the only company where I encountered it.
Wolfpup would like the per diem system at our place. The admin reasons that everyone has to eat, probably three times a day. So there’s a set amount for breakfast, a set amount for lunch, and a set amount for supper. No receipts are required, other than proof that you were on the road that day at the relevant times. We just claim those amounts, no receipts required, and it’s up to each person to decide if they want a big breakfast to star the day and a light supper, or just toast and coffee in the morning and a big meal at the end of the day.
It’s pretty stress-free for all concerned.
People still send originals of receipts?
We scan them, and make our claim on our intranet, attaching the scans to the e-claim.
No offense, I hope, and I understand your frustration, but this is not IMO a good solution to the problem.
I understand you want your $395, but I would rather nag the conference for the next six months than set myself up to get fired for forgery. YMMV.
Regards,
Shodan
Isn’t that the whole point of a per diem vs. expenses? Per diem, you get it “for each day”, and whether you’re spending more or less is either your problem or your savings. Makes for much easier accounting, too. Although what you’re describing is more of a “per mealem”.