Thank you for submitting that confession, would you mind forwarding all emails involved to the district attorney’s office so that they can expedite the fraud case against you?
Than you for your cooperation.
This is a really, really terrible idea.
And if someone calling themselves Really Not All That Bright thinks it’s a bad idea…
Is this really fraud? The conference fee was paid.
You do sound like the typical accounting types in the back office that are such a pain in the ass. The first part of that last sentence, “whenever you want”, is worth discussing and I’ll do so. But then you launch into ridiculous exaggerations with “for whatever you want” and then it somehow turns into hookers and champagne and trips to Tahiti. No, coming back from a trip with documented meal expenses that average less than the per diem allowance is NOT the same as blowing the company budget on hookers and champagne and trips to Tahiti, and if you think it is you have what is known as a “paperclip mentality” and are definitely cut out to be a paper-pushing bureaucrat.
ISTM that the perceived problem with “banking” per diems and then having an expensive meal, from the company’s POV, is that this sort of flexibility has the potential to increase their costs. If I have to abide by the per diem every day, and make sure I don’t go over, I’m likely to come in quite a bit under, and over time that shortfall adds up. But if I’m allowed to bank it, I can apply the full per diem for as many days as I’ve banked towards an expensive meal, just making sure I don’t go over in the grand total.
So the real reason for a “rule” like this is that the organization officially offers a certain per diem allowance, but hopes that actual amounts claimed will be less. I’ll bet they would also object if your meals always went a little over the per diem, and you only claimed the max.
Wow! A sensible per diem system! I bet the anal-retentive bean counters didn’t think of it, it was probably imposed on them, with the bean counters fighting it tooth and nail because it made too much sense. 
Okay, not meant as a legal opinion, but just to comment in a general way:
Fraud is about getting money by false pretences. The wiki articlegives a nice summary:
It doesn’t matter whether the person may have a claim in law for an amount of money from the other party. The question is whether the person is obtaining the money by false pretences.
To take a different example: suppose the company that got hit by the $60,000 expense claim streteching over several years, mentioned up-thread, changed its policy. They now say, on every expense claim form: NO EXPENSES WILL BE PAID AFTER 6 MONTHS!! NO EXCEPTIONS!!
You work for the company and you know that’s the policy. And then you find a gas bill that you paid when you were on a road-trip 6 and a half months ago. You know that they won’t pay it. So you fudge the bill somehow so it looks like the trip was 5 and a half months ago. You tell yourself you paid it, it was on company business, it’s just this silly management rule that keeps you from claiming it because they won’t pay a bill that’s more than six months old. And others in your office may remember that you were on the road last year, but they won’t remember the exact date. No harm, no foul, right?
Except you’ve filed a false document, to induce payment, knowing that if you filed the correct document, management won’t pay. It’s irrelevant in this hypothetical that you paid the gas bill, for a business trip, working on behalf of your employer. The employer has a firm 6-month rule, and you’re filing a false document to get around it.
Now, fraud law is a very specialised area, and will depend heavily on the exact wording of the criminal law that applies in a particular jurisdiction, and the interpretation given by the courts in that jurisdiction, so speaking from very general hypotheticals it’s not possible to say if some example would be an offence. More detailed information would be needed. But, as a general rule, submitting a forged document to get money paid to you is a bad idea, as others have commented up-thread.
As I said, not meant as legal advice to anyone, but just to comment in a general way on how fraud offences work. If anyone has a real concern about their past conduct, they should speak to a lawyer in their own jurisdiction for advice.
And the DA will look at the emails and ask what the hell s/he is supposed to do with them. Unless the employer chooses to bring charges the DA has no reason to even keep notes.
The employer’s actual response will range somewhere from actually fixing the process that made faked receipts an option to terminating you and deducting the amount of the faked receipt from your final check.
It’s the insurance company plan of fund disbursement. If they owe you money they just keep putting up barrier after barrier until you get frustrated and go away.
I can only speak firmly regarding the laws in Canada, but you are absolutely wrong about why we enfore those rules up here, and I suspect down south in the US as well. It’s not to be a pain in the ass, it’s because the law demands that we do so. There are legal standards on what qualifies as reimbursement, and if we don’t follow those standards, the company will be liable for large fines for tax evasion, because we are giving you that money tax free as a reimbursement instead of taxing it like income.
Go shove a copy of the tax code up your ass, you ignorant fuck.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen a Concur user not complain about Concur. Aside from the bugs and the undocumented changes, Concur famously speaks English differently than actual English speakers. When someone approves some step, Concur says “Awaiting approval,” which means it is not, in fact, awaiting approval. All the tenses and plurals are very loosely adhered to.
As a government manager, I have to use Concur for my own travel AND approve authorizations and vouchers for my staff. Concur is extremely non-intuitive and user-unfriendly.
However, my complaint regards rental cars. I’m pretty sure this issue stems from my agency’s protocols and not Concur itself, but Concur gives us FAIL messages whenever we don’t opt for an Economy rental car. (Note that “Economy” is smaller than “Compact,” so you know it’s basically a lawn mower engine housed in a cheap frame).
I usually rent from Enterprise and most of the time I can get an Intermediate car for the same price, or even a few dollars less. However, cheaper car = FAIL. Four people traveling together? Non-Economy size car = FAIL. We also have a policy where certain types of travel require us to schlep along required equipment and materials. For that, you need some additional space. However, anything other than an Economy size car = FAIL. We also have to drive dirt roads and two-tracts, many times up fairly steep slopes. I dare you to do that with a Ford Festiva or whatever.
Once, I was renting from the Salt Lake City airport, and the rental car guy warned me that the car I had chosen did not have the power to make it through the mountain passes heading north, unless I wanted to max out at 45 mph and feel the wind blast of every passing SUV pushing me all over the road. I opted for a larger car (totaling about an extra $4), and had to go though all sorts of clairobscur-style hoops to get that $4 reimbursed.
When a “full sized” car is something like a Camry, you can imagine what cracker-box models are considered “Economy.” And yes, at the end of the day, we can get the larger car Vouchered, but at the very least, the policy should be based on price, rather than size of car.
I haven’t seen that. It can be cumbersome to use. The part I like is emailing a photo of a receipt at the time I get the receipt, so that I never have to deal with paper after that.
However, I just checked, and with the latest expense report I submitted, a few hours later, when my immediate manager approved it, I got an email saying:
Approval Status Set To Approved
Payment Status Set To Not Paid
Then a few hours later I got another email saying:
Approval Status Set To Approved
Payment Status Set To Payment Processed
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Especially if his coworker managed to get the official receipt after nagging the conference company, and some eager beaver in Accounting went “hmm, this looks nothing like the receipt Jennshark submitted.”
This thread is giving me a 
because I’m about 4 months late on submitting expenses, and have 2 nasty grams from the nice lady in Accounting who has been very patient so far.
My last Repayment Runaround took 27 days. Accounting even said “Three more days and you can stop bothering to email and ‘drop in’ on us…” Meaning it was almost 30 days, after which I wouldn’t have gotten paid back over a thousand dollars.
One more reason I’m now driving to closer conferences and paying out of my own funds. Who needs the stress?
That’s a good point. There’s all sorts of ways a forged document gets uncovered, eventually.
Of course there are, and I’m familiar with those tax rules because they’re applicable to perks and benefits. For instance one place I worked had annual employee awards that were things like a cruise or an all-expense paid week in some tropical resort, and these were considered a tax liability for the recipient. The company consequently provided additional income compensation to offset the award’s tax liability.
But my expenses situation was not like that. If you read my post with any comprehension, you would understand that this was just a claim for meal expenses at the standard per diem rates, and nothing more, and that it occurred multiple times and they always paid the expenses. They just liked to complain about it. If there had been any chance of tax problems for them do you think they would have paid it?
This all completely ignores the concept of “per diem” expense reporting.
The US Federal government, and many private employers, have decided that accounting for every single meal / incidental expense is simply not worth the hassle. They set up specific amounts, based on geographic location, which are intended to cover 3 meals a day plus a bit extra for miscellany.
You may spend that any way you like. If you’re on a 5 day trip and the per diem is 60 bucks there, you file an expense report for 300 dollars. The company gives you that 300 dollars.
The company has no visiblity into how you spent that 300 bucks. If you eat ramen and McDonald’s 4 days and get a 5-star meal on the 5th, that’s cool. If you eat 5-star meals every day, well, you’ve probably overspent that 300 bucks. Better have enough money in your savings to pay the bill - the company doesn’t care.
If you spend it all on a whorehouse in Bangkok, well, the company might not be pleased that you were up to those shenanigans while travelling on business, and there might be consequences, but from an expense perspective, it’s none of their business.
If you eat ramen all 5 days, then yeah, you’ll pocket a bit of cash, but as long as it’s within the per diem rates, detailed accounting is neither required nor wanted.
If you’re given a daily limit to what you can spend, but you have to report actual expenses, then yeah: you’re probably going to be out of luck with the 4 days of ramen / one day splurge approach.