I wonder if there would be any liability issues if the company (county) was to pay for alcohol and Something Bad happened?
Could be in today’s world. I would suspect though that If they just gave us our usual per-diem in cash, that there would be no way to prove if I bought a beer with MY cash or the county’s cash per-diem.
If it’s on a credit card, it can be traced to the county. It can’t be if it’s just a cash per-diem.
It’s not just about being able to buy a beer with dinner. It’s all about the extra levels of bureaucracy that this crap creates.
They want receipts for a burger at McDonald’s? Ok. But it seems pretty silly.
I’ve got to agree with you. It’s a silly rule. $45 a day is a little more than what we give in per diem to our emplyees (below managers, we’re just on expenses), but it’s not excessive. The no drinks is stupid. If you’re out of town, not picking up a beer or a glass of wine is just assine.
“some dollar amount” as in “some amount that was strictly defined but I can’t be bothered to remember it.”
Yes, McD’s does give a recept; I should have sepecified that they wanted him to use a credit card. (Which McD’s does now, but didn’t then.)
I still say that per diems are a much nicer way of reimbursing the employee. If they’re set up right, the employee can have the choice: nice restaurant or ok restaurant and a magazine / movie / beer / whatever. Something small that doesn’t cost them anymore that makes the trip a wee bit more pleasant. (The choice, not what they buy.)
In our company, we still have the system that the OP mentioned. They give us $x, we stay where we want and eat and drink what we want. It is not overly generous and I always spend a little more than the accomodation component to get a better place to stay. I’m not a huge eater, so I make ground there. Many years ago, the guys would stay in a flea pit and spend the balance on booze. Their choice.
If I had to provide receipts for everything, I am certain I would be able to find many restaurants willing to give false, padded invoices. Failing that, you can buy a receipt book for a few dollars. Not that I would encourage dishonesty.
I’m surprised you still have to keep receipts, though, because one of the advantages of a credit card is that all charges show up on the bill, so the bill serves as a de facto receipt.
I dunno. I just think that credit cards are a better, safer way to go. :shrug:
Robin
I don’t understand the recept thing either. This has just started so they are ironing out the details.
It may be that on the credit card bill it will not be broken out if you bought a beer or not. :rolleyes: So we will have this flurry of recipts and some poor sap checking them against the credit card bill. I just don’t get it either. I guess that’s the part that pisses me off the most. I’ll be getting a whopping $45 a day, and you want me to account for it?
It’s not per-diem if I have to dick around with expense reports and receipts. It’s now an expense account limited to $45 a day.
Gee. Thanks. How exactly is this easier for anyone?
Understand that our employees don’t travel a lot. And never out of the country. We don’t need to shmooze and entertain people, they shmooze us (we are the GOV. after all 
). And yet now, every one of us from bus washers to managers are getting what amounts to an expense account. I dunno. Sorta seems like overkill.
The old system worked just fine. I don’t understand what this is supposed to achive. It will create a lot more work, and probably employ another person to try to manage this on the taxpayers dime. That’s about it.
I work in a system that is a combination of company credit card and receipt reimbursement. The card pays for hotel and airfare, and you get a fleet card for gas, but you collect receipts for your meals and have a dollar amount limit for each meal. I can’t buy alcohol, tobacco or flowers on the company card. Why? 'cause the Man doesn’t want to pay for alcohol, tobacco, and flowers. Suck it up, its not the morality police, it the company (in this case the government) deciding what they are and are not going to pay for. If you are already spending some of your own money on your trips, then I don’t see the issue. Pretend that you have always taken a little bit of your own money for alcohol and nothing has changed. Then pretend that you are a taxpayer and you find out that your county government officials are collecting $45 a day to travel and only spending $30 dollars a day while travelling 'cause they are using the hotel free breakfast that they payed for with their hotel bill and ate a McD’s cheeseburger for lunch. You’d want that $15 a day to stay in the government coffers to fix that pothole in front of your driveway. If you hate travelling so much that you need a cash bonus to travel, then you should find a job where you don’t travel so much. I’ve been travelling for business when the breakfast was provided at the hotel and paid for with the hotel bill, lunch was provided and paid for with the conference, and dinner was free from corporate sponsors. I would be pissed to find out that someone was collecting $45 a day from the taxpayers to eat already paid for food.
I once worked as a fill-in at a hospital 150 miles from home.
I would work for seven days and have seven days off. The agreement, which had been in place for a year prior to my working for them was, they would pay mileage, and they had a contract with the local Best Western. As long as I stayed/ate there the hospital picked up the tab. They would pay for the night before my first shift, and after my last, because I worked 12 hour nights.
The nurse that had this deal before me was male. We overlapped for the first few days so he could walk me through everything.
We had dinner together the first night and he ordered a bottle of wine. I asked if the hospital paid for alcohol, and he said they had for the past year.
I developed a routine of arriving late in the afternoon, having dinner with a glass of wine, then maybe listening to music in their tiny bar until 10:00PM, when it closed, on my first night in town. I’d have one or two glasses of wine. The rest of the week was sleep and work. I would have breakfast when I got off at 7:00 AM and they would fix me a boxed lunch to take to work. On my last day, I usually drove home, saving the hospital one night’s fee, for a total of 12 nights.
At the end of my six month contract, the hospital director called me into his office, telling me I had “defrauded” the hospital, because I put alcohol on their bill.
I told him the male nurse before me had done the same.
He had the balls to say “Yes, but, he was a man.”
The agency that sent me there, had their lawyer show him his mistake.
The per diem is supposed to cover all your expenses; business and personal. You can charge deodorant and toothpaste if you forgot to pack yours. Since you are out of town, your normal personal life is being interrupted and they are compensating you for that. Now…if you’re at a business luncheon, they can tell you that you can’t drink at all, or that they won’t pay for the drinks you do order. But if you are on personal time at dinner, and they are giving you a per diem, you should be allowed to order alcohol at that time. Enipla’s per diem set up is a bit more customized than any I’ve had. Of course, I haven’t had one since the 80s, so things may have changed since then.
I would be pissed to find out that government employees were having their dinners paid for by corporate sponsors. Your pothole isn’t going to see tha $15 anyway; once the employees have to keep a receipt, McDonald’s ceases to be more convenient than TGIFridays or Hooters. They will have no particular reason to keep their expenses low, except the reimbursement limit.
A buddy of mine’s contract stipulates that he can’t use his per deims for hookers. For this to be written into the contract can only mean that someone had done it. (He works for a major hospital, BTW.)
Then don’t listen while I tell you that government employees get their dinners paid for by corporate sponsors. I know that the $15 will never fix my pothole, but there are people out there who don’t see reality. They will believe that the government officials are taking their money and using it for their own benefit.
I have no idea about the tax system where you are, enipla, but in Australia you can’t put alcohol on corporate credit cards without incurring Fringe Benefits Tax, which is a headache for the accounts department. At least, this is how I understand it from the mandatory training class they made me attend, which gave me a headache, and from which I may not have absorbed the finer details. (I am not terribly gifted when it comes to Accounting practices.)
What I can tell you is this: if my boss does a business lunch with Industry partners, and puts alcohol on the card as well as food, I have to fill out four (4) separate forms itemising who was at the lunch, what company they were from and their position, whether they were government or non-government employees, how much wine was drank by each person (generally divide by the number in the party, but still), who ate what (ie, who had the veal, and who had the soup, etc), and so forth…then code it up to separate cost centres based on govt/non-gov’t status, and what they ate. (Seriously. If it involves silverware, it gets coded differently than if it’s finger food.)
Whereas if alcohol isn’t involved I can just list who was there and their company, and code the thing all up to one cost centre (or two, at most).
It is a giant pain in the butt, and that’s just at my end - heaven knows how complex it must get at the actual Finance Department end.
Again, if FBT isn’t an issue where you are, and it doesn’t cause secretaries or Finance personnel extra paperwork, well … I can still understand the company not wanting to pay for alcohol (which is a luxury item) while being happy to pay for normal drinks (which would classify as a basic living requirement). It sucks that you had it and now it’s taken away, but I can see why the company wouldn’t want to pay for it. And that’s quite aside from the possible legal aspects mentioned in posts above.
Of course there will always be people who then have to run the card up to the maximum daily allowance just so they Get Their Entitlements, but there are also people who are quite happy to just buy their burger, or their $14 pizza or whatever, thus saving the company money.
FWIW, it was actually flagged as a concern by our *staff *that the company was handing over too much money and the *employees *felt that a few dollars savings from each person instead of the $20 flat rate would be an intelligent way to cut costs. At offices right across the state, it regularly cropped up in the Employee Feedback surveys. Eventually, Management decided it was worth the effort to implement a new protocol, and this year they removed the flat rate and started working on reimbursement from receipts - or, if the person applies for it through the company, a corporate card. Not everyone wants a card, though.
(What can I say? Government employees are weird people. )
It has been my job to check travel expenses (FTR, employees had to provide a receipt for every expense they wanted to be reimbursed for, and there was a a maximum amount for restaurants and hotels. And yes, some people did max out the allowance, but not many do that, and restaurants, taxis drivers, etc… are generally perfectly willing to give fake receipts with whatever amount the customer wants on it).
I’ve never seen a bill for a hooker, but I’ve seen receipts from massage parlors in foreign countries, which, I strongly suspect, were the same.
Wow. hopefully that was a long time ago!
talk about dumb crude and dangerous (for the hospital).
Glad the lawyer straightened that out. Sometimes those lawyer folks are worth every penny (actually I have never wasted money on a lawyer. Sometimes it was just the comfort factor, sometimes it was just a piece of paper. But I got what I paid for).
Perhaps he traveled to Rio where some rooms in some hotels come with an optional personal hostess. It is part of the room charge and doesn’t show up on the bill. At least so I was told, I didn’t feel I needed any personal attention for one night :).
Once the practice becomes known-about 10 minutes after the first set of techs return from overseas travel :), certain hotels become problematic to cite on travel vouchers. The travel office wouldn’t tell us why though-not that they needed to by then…
Per diem is so much easier. The one time that I traveled with one, it was great. 30 dollars a day, no need for records. Yeah, it was a little more than I needed, but I’m cheap and couldn’t afford to go over it. I used to do my father’s accounts and hated dealing with ten bills from different places that he may or may not have gotten. And if you’re working from eight am to midnight, I can see that forgeting a receipt is entirely possible.
Maybe one of the guys from the sales department had done this while entertaining clients?