Why are receipts such a big deal for accountants?

Factual Questions
21

I’m not sure what you read, but this appears to have no correspondence with Feynman’s own account. They didn’t “bury him in paperwork,” they asked for a simple receipt for $2.35. And in response, Feynman childishly did refuse to provide simple receipts for future expenses, including a large one like the airfare. (I’m not sure where you’re getting the bit about "not signing for his wages.)

He complains because the government doesn’t operate like a private individual or business, and simply “trust him,” but of course they can’t. Not asking him for the receipt would have been incompetent. The “bullshit” they required was to produce a couple of simple receipts; it wasn’t like they were demanding anything out of the standard practice.

22

You have to wonder how Feynman would have reacted to a graduate assistant who spent a great deal of Feynman’s grant money without documentation.

23

I’ve done my share of government and business travel, and having to provide a receipt for every little thing can be annoying. Sometimes I’ve been out of pocket for things like tips paid in cash or taxi fares for which no receipt could be provided.

However, a lot of systems do make allowance for this by not requiring receipts for items under some amount, like $10.00. The federal system may just give you a standard per diem or personal expenses allowance, and if you spend less than that you just keep the difference.

When working on projects in Panama I just buy a receipt book and carry it around with me, so I can have taxis or field workers just sign the receipt for me.

24

I’m going to assume you have a job that required some level of education/training, and that has protocols and maybe even technical “must do” tasks in order to have done your job appropriately as defined. Perhaps even safety or regulatory related steps? If any of this is true, then you are being extremely childish to deny the accountant the same respect you would expect of yourself doing your job.

25

Hell, I got called in once because my expense account was too low.

(My flight home had been cancelled and I had to spend the night in a hotel. I had written down something like $3.87 for “meals.” They didn’t believe me and I had to produce a receipt from the hotel snack bar that showed $3.87 for the miscellaneous junk food that had been my dinner.)

My father was a traveling sales rep and spent 15-25 days a month on the road, racking up thousands of dollars in expenses. His advice was, “Never cheat. It’s not worth the effort for penny-ante stuff, and you’ll get caught for sure if you try it on big stuff.”

26

I’ve also been told by my accountant that a missing receipt here and there won’t be an issue even if audited. If you’ve got say $2000 in expenses and are missing a $20 receipt, it’s not going to be an issue. But no accountant has ever wanted to see my actual receipts.

That said, I do save receipts for about ten years, depending on how aggressive I am about shredding in my downtime.

Same applies at work. If I spent $12 on coffee and donuts while meeting someone but lose the receipt, they’re not going to hassle me, along the same lines as kunilou laid out. If I tried to claim a $300 dinner without a receipt, there’d be a hassle and if I were trying to cheat them, I’d expect to lose that job and for the word to spread. Not worth it.

27

I’m not sure what this means. Does that mean you go to the vendor to check a receipt when the automated system catches something with pattern recognition 1 in 10,000 times, but all 10,000 of those receipts have been checked?

OK, but that still doesn’t answer the question. How often do auditors actually contact a vendor to verify a receipt? (Not how often do they demand a receipt from an employee.) Is it a routine process that can be done quickly? Are restaurants, for example, used to auditors calling them up and asking if such-and-such employee’s receipt for the $50-dinner is legit? Do they readily supply that kind of verification?

28

I’m a buyer with a state issued credit card using federal funds. I don’t make a two dollar purchase unless I’ve got the vendor’s W9. It’s so much easier to be sure of what you’re doing as you go along than to have to fix it in retrospect.

If you can’t handle dealing with company regulations regarding spending, then you probably shouldn’t have access too them.

29

Right. I wouldn’t dream of seeking reimbursement from my employer for a business expense I don’t have verification of. OP, you know you bought a business widget and that it’s “right there” in your workplace. Do you think the company’s accounting staff want to traipse down to your desk to verify the widget’s presence every time somebody else buys a different business widget? How are they supposed to know the company didn’t already own a widget and the one you claimed to have bought from the office wasn’t actually for you to use at home?

30

Keep in mind that in many places that have sales tax, the company can claim reimbursement for that tax if it was expenses for the company. Sometimes the rules can get arcane - no refund for consumables like paper and ink used in the offices, but refund for fixing a machine that produces the items you sell, etc. To claim a refund, the company must if audited be able to show the tax refund claimed was from an actual tax collected by an actual tax-paying company in that state, with registration number. (In Canada, for example, need company GST number…) While an accountant might let some things go (Hmmm… those were the days - Feynman spent $2.36 to park at the airport for a day or more?) there’s a limit to what they can let go.

I know I’ve never had a hassle with claiming taxi expenses including tip, but if it was to the airport ($30 or more) then I DID get a receipt - “$33 for the trip - put $40 on the receipt and I’ll give you $40.” I never lied, but I wasn’t cheap with the company’s money - it had a reputation to uphold… For minor things, not so much. We also had a per-diem, you could claim the $50/day (a long time ago!) or provide receipts. Since I never drank, per diem actually made me money.

One time a fellow I worked with and I went to a computer show out of town. We could either take the prop puddle-jumper to the nearest big airport and fly from there, or drive to the airport. The mileage allowance was more that the prop plane fare, so “…to the maximum of equivalent air fare”. We drove in my car, I claimed the equivalent air fare, then the other guy’s boss insisted on him taking equivalent too. (I suspect that this was a dodge that others had used to make money, and his boss didn’t want to raise alerts for future claims). Years later they changed the rules and you had to provide the gas receipts to prove you drove.

Yeah, Feynman was being a dick, as was the accountant. Of course, an expense for $2 back then is like an expense for $20 or more today, so not trivial. OTOH, it’s probably a lot cheaper to fly today than back then. They should have a procedure, tolerate missing receipts if it’s less than $X and the total for the whole reimbursement is less than $Y. But anyone who thinks the government, or any large corporation, is going to reimburse an airline ticket without any documentation is delusional, especially in those days when one local flight cost more than some transatlantic flights cost today. After all - yes he was at the meeting - but he could have driven, he could have stayed at a friend’s instead of a hotel, he could have been dropped off at the airport instead of parking there, etc.

The purpose of reimbursement is to replace out-of-pocket expenses, not to give you a tidy sum which you can pocket if you can cut costs yourself.

31

Wow. What an arrogant prick.

32

I read the Feynman book when I was younger. I don’t remember the incident from that reading, but I assume my younger self was like “Yeah, stick it to the man!” Now I’m grown up.

33

In the end, he seems to have accepted the fact that they wouldn’t reimburse him if he didn’t produce documentation, so I guess everyone was happy. I also suspect his writing comes off as more arrogant because of changes in society; I don’t doubt that many private enterprises didn’t bother to require receipts back then (until they all realized that their employees were skimming off the top). I’m a little curious as to whether US air fares were totally fixed prior to deregulation, since Feynman seems to have thought that the price of an airline ticket to San Francisco was always the same.

34

Plus there’s the basic point that a cancelled airline ticket is proof that *someone * travelled from LA to San Francisco. It’s not just the question of the amount, but the proof of a trip.

Curious whether Mr Feynman took a similar approach when he was reviewing the System used by NASA before Challenger. And did he accept it when he heard from a NASA official, “What, don’t you trust us when we tell you what we think happened?”

35

Well, there was first class , business (“clipper”) class, coach, and excursion fare. Plus there were the “night” versions of each of the fares: For example coach was Y and night coach was YN.

Every office that did any traveling got a monthly phonebook-like volume called the Official Airline Guide (OAG) that listed nearly every city pair in the United States and the available flights. After the name of the city-pair was a list of all of the available fares. Yes, they were fixed by law and by regulation and every airline had to charge the same fares. (OK, I’m not sure about intra-state flights.)

There was little or no chance a business traveler would ever qualify for an excursion ticket. It required something like 30-days advance purchase and a Saturday night stay. I suppose a traveler could trade in a standard ticket for a night ticket and pocket some cash there, but even after deregulation when I started flying the company would generally buy the tickets using a purchase order through a travel agent and the tickets would be endorsed so that all refunds and adjustments had to go through the travel agent. That created incredible hassle when you had to change tickets out in the field and the paperwork didn’t go through right.

36

I’ve taken a first year college accounting course, so obviously I’m no expert, but…

Accountants are trained not to trust anybody. We were taught that check signing authority should require more than one person (to prevent fraud), and the person who buys stuff for the company shouldn’t be the same person who writes checks to buy that stuff (because if it’s just one person, it’s easy to defraud the company). The course gave examples of companies being defrauded. They gave an example of business owner who hired a family member as their bookkeeper… who told them they would do random spot checks of the books (to detect fraud). I may have a thick skull, but I detected a running theme there…

I learned why businesses like checks so much, because of the paper trail. A check acts like part of a receipt.

And if that business is ever audited by the tax department, the government can ask to see those receipts, so employees claiming expenses directly impacts the business’s bottom line.

37

Arrogant is when one arrogates something unto oneself. Feynman is one of the United State’s, and the world’s actual geniuses. It would behoove one to mind what he says. (Unless, of course, your remark referred to the guy who can trust him to approve/disapprove of the textbooks, but doesn’t trust him for the $2.35 parking fee without a receipt.)

After the Challenger incident, a group of dozens of astro-and other physicists was gathered in a huge conference room debating what in the world could have happened to the O-rings. Did they freeze and break or not? The consensus was moving toward “we’ll just have to run several expensive experiments over the course of months to determine this!”

Feynman was there at the VIP table, which suits his position. He listened to the back and forth for a while. Then, he poured some of the ice water provided on the table to slake the thirsts of the attendees into a styrofoam cup, and dipped an O-ring (the thing being discussed) into it. Then he held it up and snapped it in two for everyone to see. The room fell silent. He left. (Apparently with better things do to.)

Some people might find him arrogant. I think he’s cool. :cool:

Oh yes, RECEIPTS! Proof baby. Proof.

38

He discussed the incident in detail in his second autobiographical book “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”

I no longer have my copy, but this does not sound like how he described it. It sounds more like a dramatization of the incident.

Just going by memory, he was visited privately by one of the other members, IIRC over the weekend. That person was the one who suggested the relationship between temperature and the O-ring.

The book then goes on to describe how he had decided on the experiment, but they didn’t have any water glasses ye, and he needed to get the water before the perfect timing.

He was a genius, but the reality of that incident was different.

39

Back in the day I traveled to conferences and such. Often when I asked for a receipt from a taxi driver or some such they’d just tear off a slip from a pad and hand it to me. Nothing filled in at all.

It was up to me to put in the date and amount. I could have easily padded things a few bucks here and there.

Being a computer person, I also sometimes recreated a missing/damaged receipt.

Like a lot of things, receipts are a form of security theater.

40

The fact that Feynman was a brilliant physicist has nothing to do with his social skills. If you followed what Feynman said, you would never get reimbursed for your travel expenses. If you weren’t the most brilliant physicist in the world, you would most likely be fired too.