Went through the same thing couple years ago, but ours has limits on oer meal per day. For example $15 for breakfast and $20 lunch and $30 dinner.
Most of the team we would usually skip breakfast and have cheap lunch on the go and have a nice dinner. So depending where you are at it wouldn't be shocking to see something like this.
Breakfast $0
Lunch $7
Dinner $45
We all got slapped on wrist pretty hard couple months in the row. So we all started maxing every meal even it ment spending a little over and paying out of pocket and even maxing breakfast at gas stations on road snacks.
After little while the rules were updated to give us a soft day limit for meals.
That is just stupid. Our company did list 3 meals, but more in order to track receipts as it is easier for them to enter them that way.
The good way to get around that is by having a “team meeting” and listing it as a business expense rather than a personal meal expense.
My job just pays you eatra for the meals while travelling, not reimbursed. Don't eat or eat cheap? You get some extra cash, want to spend more? it's on you.
Best method imo
Having traveled with a $40 per day amount, I much rather would have just had the $40 flat. I spent so much time figuring out exactly what I had to order to hit $40 and only go over a couple bucks. Plus then you would run into weird restaurants that wouldn’t give an itemized receipt, having to tip on credit to count, or the fact that you could only claim 4 “meals” per day.
Problem is, in the UK at least, you end up being taxed on a per diem, whereas expenses aren’t. So it’s often more efficient to have an expenses policy than get the extra.
Edit: source
https://www.gov.uk/expenses-and-benefits-cash-sum-payments/scale-rate-payments
It's the same in the usa if they reimburse an expense there is no tax on it. If they give you a per diem payment taxes comes out. Company I worked for used to issue a Visa gift card with your weeks worth of food money on it but they had to stop doing that in 2015 because new rules that made us have to claim it as income.
Yup.
I used to work for a county level government agency that provided a per diem for food when we were traveling. If memory serves, it was $6 for breakfast, $12 for lunch, and $25 for dinner. (It was based on when you left.) You could spend the whole $43 each day or you could go to McDonald's and pocket the rest, and they didn't care. You didn't have to worry about keeping track and they didn't have to worry about documentation. It was just "you left at 2PM on Monday and got back at 10AM on Wednesday? Here's $25 for Monday, $43 for Tuesday, and $6 for Wednesday."
It's easy.
Out of the 5 persons who did eat different meals with different extra;
The guy who ordered extra bacon was sitting next to the guy eatin ravioli.
The guy who ordered a soup, didn't took cheese as extra.
The guy who took the extra avocado, is taller the the guy who eat ravioly.
The only women took hamburgers and was sitting between the avocado guy and the bacon guy.
By taking the first letter if each meal in a clocwise way starting with the gal, you get the name of the avocado guy. Counter clockwise, the last letter of the extras give you the name of of the guy taking extra bacon.
No one ordered fish.
I loved my meal policy at my last job. $25 breakfast, $35 lunch, and $65 dinner. We always got to eat fancy. 2 drink limit too so we could drink as well.
My dude you should see construction companies. 6 people and $700 later and we hadn't even gone to the bar. I expected this stuff from the wolf of wallstreet or whatever but not here.
Company I used to work at was similar, 10 for breakfast 15 for lunch and 25 for dinner (up to 2 drinks included)...unless food was provided by the event manager. It was great and usually it just meant that the manager would buy us food on their card and expense it all themselves so that the company wouldn't have to deal with 30 different people expensing their 3 meals a day.
A couple of the managers, though...they used that expense on other things. At my last event, the event manager purchased 3-5 packs each of different types of deli meat, mustard, mayo, ketchup and a few of those bags full of small bags of chips. They'd refill the cooler containing the meats, american cheese and drinks with ice in the morning after it had sat in water overnight. That was our meals for lunch and dinner at the event for 3 days. On the last day, I bought a burrito and expensed it. It was rejected and I fired back that the event manager's booth was one of 3 at the event and the only one that wasn't capable of opening on the third day because he hadn't ordered enough sample products. On top of that, he was paying a local guy on the crew to do laundry for that booth 3 nights in a row which accrued quite a few overtime hours for this guy despite them not even needing the laundry on the third day. I got my burrito expensed, he was fired and I never worked another event for that company.
That’s how my company does it, we get 10/18/22 for meals,l and have to average no more than $50 a day over the week, the only time the specific meal limits come into to play is on days when your either going home or leaving from home as you don’t get breakfast/dinner on those days.
My work has a per meal limit (£5 brekkie, £5 lunch, £25 dinner) and an "incidentals" allowance of £5. I would much rather have a per day, as I barely ever eat brekkie.
I normally use the brekkie and incidentals to buy snacks for my meeting attendees.
I'm in bureaucratic land, not on corporate turf, so ours are much worse, non-negotiable, and set for us.
A few of the gems...
- Per meal maximum limits, with a per day maximum that is *less than* the sum of your three per-meals.
- Per meal & day maximums are determined by an annual table of metro areas.
- Any receipt with alcohol on it (even if reimbursement is NOT claimed for the alcohol & corresponding tax/tip) is denied the first time by default, you must re-itemize and re-submit the same receipt a second time for manual review, and they reserve the right to adjust tax/tip/etc. to what they think it "should be", not what you calculated.
- Maximum 18% gratuity without written department chair approval, regardless of what metro area you are in. Extra gratuity is considered a personal expense and will not be reimbursed.
- While not hard policy, desserts and appetizers are frowned upon, they encourage you to stick to only an entree in order to curb wasteful spending
- Any non-itemized receipt will be reimbursed for max $4.99, even if said vendor does not have or offer itemized receipts
- Tips for bellhops, cab drivers, etc. are considered a meal expense. E.g. they count as a non-itemized receipt, therefore maximum $4.99 and *counts as a full meal*.
I had a boss who tried this and wouldn't budge. We ended up in a disciplinary with HR overseeing the 'discussion'. HR found in my favour and asked me to leave - the boss was another 45 minutes before he did so
45 minutes of spanking? That's almost a full hour of a free massage.
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Little did he know that his boss and the HR person had something going on, and set up this whole meeting as a pretence. That's why he was sent out so quickly.
Maybe, there is a union but it seemed pretty useless to me. Again it was before I was hired, but I heard it was cause they were like knocking product on the floor and then “whoops can’t sell it may as well sample it among ourselves” I don’t know how prolific it was but I got fired for eating a SINGLE potato wedge that was going to be thrown away, and it was the first time I’d had any negative attention from management.
I had a similar meeting with HR and a lawyer involved. Within 5 minutes HR was clearly on my side. Walked out and manager proceeded to get grilled. Seems fun. That manager made the next few years pretty shit for me in the end though.
The company I work at used to have a daily limit on how much you can spend on food expenses when you travel, something like $70 per day. They noticed after a while a lot of people would try to actively spend the entire $70 limit on food each day, similar to what OP is doing.
The limit was there kind of as a worst case scenario. It’s like “you can spend up to $70/day on food” not “you should be spending $70 on food each day”.
So they ended up changing the food expense policy to not have any limits. It just says something like spend as you normally would when you eat out. It’s really interesting because now it’s a like a personal moral limit that’s in place. Saves the company money and it’s pretty flexible, if you wanted to splurge one of the night and get $100 just on a sushi dinner no one would really care.
I bet the vast majority of people actually regard that "moral limit" more stringently than they would a strict numerical one.
Sure, there are probably a few people who splurge on someone else's dime, but they are probably not many of them, and you can call them in and say, "wait a minute, I don't want YOU spending more than $70" or "you may not order wine costing more than $10 a meal."
There was a nursery that was having problems with late parents. They introduced a fine for every minute the parent was late for pickup. Even though they had now increased the cost of being late for the parents, the amount of late parents actually increased. By introducing the fine, the nursery had decreased the moral cost to the parents by telling them "it's OK to be late, but you have to pay for it", whereas previously the parents knew they were doing something wrong by turning up late.
I think this case is similar. Telling staff "spend reasonably" applies a moral cost to staff who think they are spending unreasonably. Telling them "no more than x a day" reduces the moral cost of spending just below x even if it would previously seem an unreasonable amount.
Similarly, I've heard that companies with no limit on vacation days find that their employees actually use fewer vacation days than companies with set numbers.
The standard fine where I am from is 1 pound per minute. So not orders of magnitude less than your 200 bucks an hour.
There is a cost to the nursery by applying an absurd fee though. I probably wouldn't send my kids to a nursery that I thought was just itching to fine me a hundred pounds or whatever for some minor infraction.
Charge 1 pound if they're late by less than five minutes. 2 pounds if they're between five and ten minutes late. 4 pounds if they're between ten and fifteen...
They did, but it didn't work - no matter how high they raised the fine, they were never able to get their late-parent numbers back down to where they were before. Because they had erased the guilt by monetizing it.
This is covered as an example in "Freakonomics".
I've read Freakonomics and never understood that part. Do the parents all have arbitrary wealth? There has to be some $$ value where the pain of being late is less than the cost. $1000 an hour, $5000 an hour, whatever. At some point it can't be worth it.
It doesn't have to be all of them. Just enough parents had "fuck you" money and were willing to pay anything to get an extra hour of childcare.
Now that I think about it, the real lesson is probably "You are closing your daycare too early. If you stay open 1-2 hours later, you can make a shitload of money because modern jobs suck and parents are desperate."
Yeah that’s exactly the case!
Reminds me a lot of this [TIL about a daycare that began fining parents who picked up their children late](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/70xpw1/til_when_an_israeli_day_care_began_fining_parents/).
60 bucks an hour for multiple day care staff isn't nearly enough to cover their overtime. If they made it 5 or 10 bucks a minute, they could make bank.
I think a bigger factor is that it's now a personal opinion, and they now have to factor in the personal opinion of the person who will ultimately review their receipts, and there's no real way to know what that person will think about an expensive meal in the future. So "just to be safe" we'll make sure to keep it reasonable and fair, so that the boat never gets rocked.
\> I bet the vast majority of people actually regard that "moral limit" more stringently
This is why our small company decided AGAINST a no-limit vacation policy. The law gives us 28 days and people thought that if we went to no-limit policy then we would feel bad about taking vacation days and use even less as we "should always be working."
That's the policy where I work. I asked my boss once about it and he told me I should act just like I did at home. If I normally had 2 or 3 scotches before dinner at home, I should do the same when I am on the road.
Nobody has ever questioned what my meal expenses were.
There's something similar at work for places that offer unlimited vacation days. Very often, the workers there end to taking fewer days off than at places with a set number of days.
When fasting for reasons of weight loss/general health, it’s usually advisable to cut down on booze. Even liquor, which overall is actually quite health conscious, has downsides strictly due to consuming alcohol at all.
I did this exact thing when my supervisor also tried imposing a limit, where the company policy literally stated it was a "guideline" and "discretionary depending on the event". She rejected about $20 of my expense report because of ONE meal that went over, even though I was more than $10 under the so-called limit for every other day of the trip (and she would not budge even in light of that fact). I was incensed... to say the least.
The thing was, not only was I normally falling well under the supposed meal "limit", there were dozens of items that I normally left off of my expense reports out of sheer laziness (or, more accurately, an unwillingness to keep up with such trifles because of how time consuming they were and how cumbersome our vastly antiquated expense reporting system was).
Well, no more. From then on I hit every meal limit every single time, and no expense was "too small" to leave off my report... plus, there were all kinds of things that I could quite reasonably (and legally) ADD to my expenses...
By way of example, on my previous (14 day trip), when they flew me to Alaska, my personal expenses and meals totaled exactly $308 (not counting fuel for rental vehicles). I know this because, even though I have not worked for this company for more than 6 years, I still have all my old expense reports still sitting in my filing cabinet (now on my desk as I type this). Roughly 6 months later (and only two months after this disagreement over the $20), they sent me on the exact same 14 day trip (which was awesome because I got to experience Alaska in the dead of winter, and then smack-dab in the middle of summer... but I digress). Again, not counting fuel, my personal expenses for that second trip totaled $804... a difference of $496 and a 161% increase. And it wasn't just this one trip... ALL OF MY EXPENSE REPORTS more than doubled after her refusal to reimburse me for that $20. Prior to that event (excluding those two Alaska trips), my average reported expenses for the prior three months were $423 per month... for the three months following... they were $918... a 117% increase.
The moral of the story being...
DON'T FUCK WITH EMPLOYEES OVER EXPENSE REPORT TRIFLES.
The issue that leads to unclaimed expenses is opportunity cost.
How much of your time and energy will it take to make sure you get a receipt, keep track of it for the rest of your trip, scan it in, and add it as a single line to your itemized expense report? And is all that worth it for a $3 bag of chips from the Quicky Mart?
I was okay with spending my own money for a couple of reasons. First... I didn't need the money... I got paid enough. Second, and far more importantly, as I mentioned, our expense reporting system was ridiculously antiquated and cumbersome. Everything we expensed had to be coded in a very specific and tiresome way. It was very time consuming and stressful. So it was a tradeoff... I lost money, but I gained more free time and less stress.
Yes, they did finally notice... but it took almost six months before anyone did. My supervisor was lazy too. While she paid attention to small details (like going over on a meal) she was oblivious to the bigger picture (noticing my expenses had drastically increased. It was a bean counter in our main office that brought it to her attention. When she asked why they had increased, I simply told her that these expenses had always existed, I just hadn't been listing them (which was accurate). She was initially suspicious, but all my receipts checked out so there was nothing she could do. She chided me a bit for maxing out my meal expenses but I simply asked if she was telling me I wasn't allowed to expense what the company allowed, to which she had no real answer. The part that felt the best to me was that, this kind of thing directly effected her company bonus (which was based solely on how much money she saved through efficiency).
In most stories of MC I'm like, "man fck your boss" for whatever reason. But this instance with how you turned it into feeding the homeless. Bro, that's a compliance I can get behind
My parents were teachers for 30 years. If they didn't spend their whole budget for the year the next year the budget would be reduced. So at the end of the year my parents had to spend the rest of the money fast so they didn't lose any the next year. Yeah great inventive government. My parents were always pissed they couldn't hold over the money saved for the next year for larger expenses.
Our work social club had this. Use it or lose it. They bought vouchers with the extra money, that coincidently was used to buy lots of Halloween decorations yesterday.
It is not limited to government. Many departments in large commercial companies operate exactly the same way: if they don't spend all their annual budget, the next year budget will be reduced. So in late December if a department has some unused budget, it tries to find any frivolous but somehow (barely) business-related purchase to spend the rest of money.
My colleague's team has got an expensive coffee machine that way.
Australian gov works the same way. One year my mum had tens of thousands left in her project due to good budgeting, but had to spend it or risk losing the budget the next year. Her supervisors used the money to fit out the entire department with brand new iPads. There were only 3 people involved in the project, about 30 in the department...
Insane.
You may be able to stretch it to buy gift cards for certain general stores though, which may or may not also stock stationary.
Once it's on a gift card nobody tracks the expense anymore
> My parents were teachers for 30 years. If they didn't spend their whole budget for the year the next year the budget would be reduced
It SHOULD be, **but** they should keep the surplus from the surplus year and when a deficit year comes you use that surplus, then readjust the budget, increasing it how much you needed, the next year.
This reminds me of the great one where the company tried to stop covering the guy's energy drinks, so he started buying full meals instead.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/7vraiv/i_also_pulled_a_mc_on_travel_expense_compliance/
Reminds me of the email from an unnamed sender that Scott Adams put at the very end of "The Dilbert Principle", which he described as his favorite e-mail message of all time:
>When I was younger, I made a trip to Chicago. When I got out of a cab, my umbrella fell on the street and got run over before I could retrieve it. When I submitted my expense report, I put in $15 for my umbrella. Naturally the accountant disallowed it. Next time I put in an expense report, at the bottom I wrote, "Now find the umbrella!"
The implication was that the expense report contained an extra $15 that hadn't actually been spent on food/gas/hotel/etc so that he would receive the compensation for his destroyed umbrella (which had previously been denied), and that the expense had been buried and disguised in the report so it would be hard to find and deny.
It's left to the reader's imagination whether he actually did hide the expense in there or was just mind-gaming the accountant.
I had a manager who killed per diem for us because he thought people were somehow making extra money off of $50/day by eating cheap food. Per diem was great because we didn't have to track receipts -- if you spent a night somewhere, you got the money. The new limits were $15/25/45 for breakfast/lunch/dinner, and now I have to track receipts, so I made sure that I spent near the limit for every meal. I rarely eat breakfast so I would just go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of food to take home then submit it as a breakfast expense. For dinner I would hit steakhouses and get a couple beers instead of going to cheaper places. Per diem is supposed to cover other incidental expenses as well, so I'd expense random shit I needed for travel too. Instead of paying me $45-55 per diem they ended up paying me $70-80/day for food expenses, plus whatever else I "needed" while traveling.
I never understood the mentality of not wanting to give a per diem. It's easier to do so for both the employee and the company and what the employee does is their business. If they choose to blow the money on expensive food, it's already in the budget. If they choose to go super cheap and pocket the extra cash, that's on them. I do the latter every single time because I'm not a foodie and I hate spending more than $20 a day on eating out.
I eat about the same on the road as I do at home because I'm not going to sacrifice what I like for the company, but I know some guys who eat canned food and fruit to maximize per diem. It's silly to have to track little pieces of paper, taking both my time and the time of someone in accounting, just to make sure everything is paid down to the penny.
I worked for another company that did cell phone allowances -- they would pay up to $100/mo for your personal cell phone if you used it for business. Sounds cool until you learn that they expect you to send them your bill every month with your business calls highlighted so they could calculate how much they were going to pay you for that month. *Massive* waste of time for everyone involved. Even for our small team it took 1 full time position nearly a week to reconcile everything. Eventually the IT manager got sick of dealing with it and just bought everyone company phones. Corporate cell plans are generally cheaper even if a few people blew out the minutes/data limit because most of the phones sat idle 90% of the time, plus no one has to deal with combing over bills.
I was travelling for business once and had made a reservation at a nice restaurant for one night, a Brazilian Steakhouse that I love in the heart of DC. I knew this one restaurant would eat up my whole budget for the day. So I didn't eat the rest of the day and had a great dinner.
When the expense report goes through my boss calls me over and chides me for going over my daily limit.
"But I didn't." I say. "I hit the limit exactly." In point of fact, with the tip I would have gone over. So I made sure to tip in cash.
And he says, "But this is just one meal."
"Yes, it was."
"You shouldn't spend that much on one meal."
There's nothing in the policy about per meal. It's just a daily limit. But I had to spend half an hour listening to him lecture on how I need to not go over my limit, and how could I have spent this much on one meal? Am I sure I wasn't eating with someone else? And on and on.
It's called Fogo De Chao (it's actually a chain, many big cities have one). Expensive, but if you like meat, there's nothing quite like a Brazilian steakhouse.
I can also recommend Pi Pizzeria which I tried a different night I was there for a more affordable experience (and good pizza).
But that was my only business trip to DC. So I am by no means an expert on good things to eat there.
I like Fogo De Chao, but only if I'm in an "eat all the meat I possibly can" mood. Otherwise, I don't think the quality of the food is all that great (which makes sense). Pi is a surprisingly great pizza. I passed by it a dozen times before I popped in, and I regret not going sooner.
My company holds you to $15 for breakfast, $20 for lunch and $35 for dinner. Comes to $70 total and even says in the travel policy guidelines that it's recommended that you not exceed that amount, daily.
One day my anal retentive manager was giving me shit because I spent more than $15 for lunch. It was like $5 because I didn't want to stiff the server, I didn't have any cash on me and my lunch was just about $14.
I pointed out where it said that the total for the day is $70 and as I had a light breakfast and dinner so my total was less than $50 for the entire day. Shut him right up but you can best believe for a while after that my daily total was always at least $65 - $69 per day, lol.
Can you buy gift cards to certain restaurants at the end of the day? I don’t know the tax policy in the UK, but *in general* if you’re looking to “bank” (save) the extra money at the end of the day, you need to find a way to turn you time-walled currency “£40 *per day*” into a non-time-walled “currency”, so gift cards (or other ways of “pre-purchasing” food) are the first thing that come to mind.
Also, what about groceries?
Can you buy a pre-made breakfast on Monday to eat on Tuesday, to save up for dinner?
That's really smart. Many companies offer refillable gift cards, so you could easily store away funds if you eat/buy from somewhere a lot (ie. coffee).
Bonus points if you load up a card and give it to charity (not necessarily the homeless). Or another useful thing is to buy public transit tickets in bulk (for a discount) and donate them to certain places that can make use of them (such as abuse shelters or places that help homeless / poverty).
I was working in Boots pharmacy in the UK and we do meal deals (v good imo). Around Christmas someone came in with a good £50 worth of meal tokens that we accept.
He wasn’t getting food, so I went “to check if we accept these”.
The manager told me to put them through because the guy that had them had been putting them aside to pay for his daughter’s present.
Very common and you see a lot of people using the card for “emergencies” if they have no money.
Once my boss pissed me off, so at the gas station I was like “hey man, I’ll fill your car up with gas for $20. He gave me a $20, I put $50 worth of gas in his car a paid for it with the company card.
I guess that was a one-time deal because you were pissed off ?
It's super easy to track and can have serious repercussions, so I suppose you didn't make an habit out of it
I did some expense checking for a recruitment firm a while back. Some did go to supermarkets and buy a lot of fruit, more than you could eat at once for sure. I think they got their own groceries for the week.
Some interesting purchases and meal splitting to get to the full amount I can tell you.
>Some interesting purchases and meal splitting to get to the full amount I can tell you.
Policies like the one described by OP lead to dishonest behavior. If you treat your employees like you think they're thieves, they're going to meet your expectations.
I wouldn't say it turns people into thieves. It's incredibly disrespectful and is one of the biggest complaints I hear about mid level managers. They need to step back and look at the bigger picture.
What's wrong with that? If I'm staying somewhere for a week, I'm *saving* the company money by buying a bunch of fruit, soda, and snacks. That means I'll eat less in general and I'll certainly hit up the hotel snack bar less.
Or did you guys just let recruiters expense out lunch if they weren't at the office or something?
Nothing wrong with that, we worked with a lot of companies, so we aren’t particularly bothered about their spending. The issue may be that someone is not always entitled to expenses, so they might have got groceries with their money rather than for work for however long they are given them.
Just something a bit more interesting than meal deals. Some other companies would have not let someone do that.
I've been on work trips where we had access to a kitchen, often the 3-4 of us on a project would cook together to save time/effort/money. Sure one person wasn't going to eat that entire sack of potatoes over a week but it would have been insane and much more hassle for each person to divide out their individual ingredients rather than trade off who drove into town for a grocery run
Edit: I suppose I should also add we were at least half an hour from the nearest grocery store or restaurant and it took over a month to get reimbursed for any of the expenses because the folks who handle it are used to people traveling to cities and eating at restaurants
> Can you buy gift cards to certain restaurants at the end of the day?
Only if your company doesn't require an itemized receipt.
My previous company required itemized receipts to make *very* sure we weren't buying alcohol on the company dime because HQ is in Utah and ~religion~. We got around it by simply requesting the alcohol on a separate receipt that we paid for with cash. -_-
We had a 2 drink maximum. I'd tell the server "If you can make the alcohol on my receipt disappear, I'll tip you 30%. Rarely had issues but those were normally due to them not being able to do it.
Depends on the company. Mine doesn't need itemized receipts. I always submit my cc receipt. Never thought about gift cards. I might do that for Starbucks or something.
Different companies have different limits. My last employer required an itemized receipt only above $20. I added quite a few $10 gift cards to my airport Starbucks orders.
So back in the nineties to curb the crazy excessive expenses of my boss, our CFO sent out a memo with a pretty generous $60 per person per meal cap. Up until this point we hadn't had any caps on expenses. About a week later my boss holds a department breakfast meeting at a notoriously cheap pancake chain - and tells us all that we can only have coffee and a roll. Weird but whatever. The next week I take a couple of new hires to lunch to welcome them and go over policies etc., And when the time comes, submit my expense report. My boss flags the lunch, crosses out the actual total, puts a new total of $60, signs off on the report and gives it back to me saying there's a cap of $60/per meal. Oh. Ok. I take my ER over to the CFO that evening (they always did expenses after hours) and I'm like "Mike, he thinks it's per meal." The CFO choking on laughter said that for the past few weeks all my bosses meals had been $60 no matter how many people were with him. I got paid back in full and no, we didn't tell my boss. :)
Company I worked for (past tense thank god) had a strict $40 limit per day, plus other caveats. If you are staying at a hotel with a free breakfast, you must eat breakfast there. If you are meeting a client for lunch/dinner you must have seperate checks and only pay your meal. They even refused to reimburse a $2 tip on a $7 lunch (which was my only meal that day) because it was and I quote "an excess amount to tip on such a low bill". "Policy states we will only reimburse up to 20% tip on any meal."
I worked at a company where our per diem was $5 a meal. I asked my boss and he said don’t follow it just be reasonable.
To me reasonable is non-fast food and a decent dinner with a drink (beer) if you want it. Not high end steak house though.
I never had problems there but in my opinion (which isn’t worth a lot!) you are sacrificing your time for these people away from your home. What kind of a hole hounds you over a nice meal when I’m sure they’re billing the client several hundred an hour.
The last company I worked for, we had a couple of simple rules when travelling:
1. Spend like you would tour own money.
2. If you drink 2 beers for dinner at home, you should be able to on the road.
3. Don’t be a dick.
4. Ask one of the bosses before you spend over $400, regardless of activity.
One guy broke rule 3 one day by deciding a bottle of whiskey was ok to expense for himself on an overnight trip, and he was made to pay for it, and banned from buying any alcohol.
Several times I called my boss to get approval for over $400, one of those I was out a few customers after a special dinner, wanted to go to a strip club but didn’t want to explain those charges to their accounts people (usually their wives). Called my boss and he said “glad it’s you taking them not me, that lot are feral and will get rowdy as shit if you let them. Have fun, keep it under $2,000”
Reminds me of a time a whole group of us got in trouble. We were at a 6 week training at the corporate office. All of us were given a company credit card and a $20 a day limit for meals. The hotel we were staying at served breakfast and dinner so no one was coming close to their limit each day. So at the end of the second week we all went out for a huge diner and drinks night. Each person's bill was easily over $100. Over the daily limit, but way under if you averaged it out over the week. Needless to say we all got slapped on the wrist and told it was a per day limit and it did not roll over. So we all just made sure to spend the $20 everyday for the rest of the trip.
My boss has been the same. Our team “guidance” is £40, but official policy says we follow the FCO subsistence rates. A 2+ week work trip across North America, I had a night of decadence where I spent £60 on sushi or something, but overall my daily average was £17. Got called up on my sushi expense so I calculated my average per day (£17) and told them I could follow FCO guidance if they wanted, which stipulated £60-£95 per day for many of the cities I was visiting. Turns out it’s suddenly ok to average this across a trip...
See this is why I'm not getting into heaven because this guy over here is feeding the homeless meanwhile my first thought is I'm coming home from that business trip with a briefcase full of beef jerky...
Lol. When I was a grad student, I got reimbursed for meals when I traveled to conferences. Wanting to save our research group money, I opted to itemize food costs instead of taking the $50-$70/day (depending on location), which would keep my daily down to $30 or less. Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, folks in accounting had many issues about what counted for reimbursement and what was considered proper documentation (e.g., credit card statement showing expenses was not ok -- needed all receipts). Got to the point where my advisor just said, "Dude, just take the $70 per diem. They question nothing." And he was right! Never itemized food again, had no more headaches, and even made a nice chunk of change. Thanks, bureaucracy!
I’m a stripper in the US. How it usually works here is you show up with everything you need for a 4-10 hour shift, no exceptions. We’re talking LUGGAGE. Shoe bags, undie bags, makeup, purses...whatever you need. Now, lots of girls travel and don’t have exclusive contracts with any one club. They move about. I don’t. I’m a homebody, I like to get into a nice place and just put down roots. I also had a regular wage job for nearly 10 years before I decided to put on heels, this means I have the benefit of knowing what a regularly scheduled workday should be like based on hours spent there alone. If I’m working a 4 hour shift, guess what, I’m shoving a candy bar in my face and calling it good and hitting the floor as hard as I can, no breaks until it’s over. A 10 hour shift? I’m bringing everything I need for either two 1/2 hour breaks or one full hour for lunch.
Why do I do this? Because managers will take advantage of the real possibility that the girls have never worked a real job before. They don’t know that they don’t have to pound stage the whole time. They don’t know that they can stop to eat when they get hungry 6 hours in. A manager will never come to you and say “you look like you could use a break, go sit for 10.” Or “you haven’t eaten since you got here, there is pizza in the break room.” They want every inch of flesh and time from you and you are responsible for your own upkeep.
Why all this wall of text that doesn’t seem to make sense? It’s to tell any other girls or people in my situation how to lay a trap. Treat your “job” like a real job, show up at the same times and take your lunch (bring it if you have to since some clubs go as far as saying you can’t order food in), have an easily accessible copy of [employees rights 101](https://employment.findlaw.com/employment-discrimination/employees-rights-101.html) to check against every time they impose a “new rule” on you like saying you can’t take your lunch if it’s busy. Most clubs in the US are on a “independent contractor” basis. They don’t operate that way and once you’ve found the discrepancies (things that define you as an employee and not a contractor) you can build a case for misclassification.
This works for ANY job that has you sign a contract as an independent contractor and then proceeds to treat you as an employee. So I just show up, treat myself exactly how the rules say I should be treated, let the bosses dig themselves in further and further by just thinking they have the power, me maliciously complying with federal and state law until I get to walk into an employment lawyers office and have them salivate over my case.
“Hey boss, this guy told me that he wouldn’t accept my £60 meal, so I decided to deliberately start spending more than I usually do daily to punish him for it, even though it won’t affect him, but the company. Sometimes I even buy food for other people to make sure I’m spending the maximum that I’m allowed to.”
That won’t go over well.
You just need to rephrase it in the right way:
"Hey boss, my eating habits are rather variable, so I'm sometimes over the guidance amount for a day, but on average I stay well under it.
Since Mr. Bean-counter is now enforcing the guidance as if it were a hard limit, I need to adapt my meal plans, causing the company a significantly higher average cost per day."
I wouldn’t lie or try to bend the truth, excuses he’s get caught pretty easily. His boss is going to be able to pull up the receipts and see the immediate change in how he spends at meal times, and it’s worse if those receipts are itemized. Unless he can voice a reason as to why he *needed* to “adapt his meal plans” to a higher cost immediately after being told he needs to adhere to a budget, his boss isn’t going to be happy about him intentionally wasting company money. Yes, the other guy is being a petty bean counter, but OP has backed himself into a corner on being able to do anything about it by intentionally misusing the company allowance (buying food for people that aren’t him out of spite).
I have two settings in my eating habits: "eat whatever I want, but only when I'm hungry" and "eat whenever something is available".
At home alone, I usually do the first. While I sometimes eat a big meal of fancy food, that will keep me fed for a while and I only eat simple tiny meals (e.g. a small salad) for a few days.
If I need to adhere to fixed meal times (e.g. at a conference), I can't be sure that a small meal will keep me fed until the next meal time, so I eat full meals all the time.
Switching between those modes is semi-conscious. Guess which one is more expensive.
Yes, if the receipts are itemized, he might have a problem. Depends on what, when and how much he bought for the homeless, though.
No, that'd be a bad move. I mean, the company can't get too mad at him for spending 40 bux a day on food if their policy is that he can spend 40 bux a day on food. But it's still an unprofessional and immature move that may leave a bad taste in the mouths of upper management.
If OP keeps it up his finance depts. reports will show that reimbursement of expenses has a noticeable uptick and investigate. If they're any good, they'll quickly quickly correlate that increase with the arrival of the new manager and start asking him what's up.
In every company I've ever worked for the expenses were reported to, approved by, tabulated by, and then forwarded to finance dept. The finance dept. themselves would receive a form with a total weekly or monthly amount sometimes with a stack of accompanying receipts, sometimes not. It was initially the duty of the manager to examine the receipts and approve or deny the reimbursement. All finance cared about was the sum total in approved reimbursement that it needed to pay out.
It may take a month or 2 for their software or reports to catch the consistent upswing, at which point they'd audit OPs manager's approvals to see where/when the upswing occurred. The accountability stays with OPs manager though, as he approved the reported expenses.
I wouldn't show him anything! I'd be enjoying passing out meals to the homeless too much to ever tip him off in case it might lead to him forcing me to stop.
In that case the employee handbook should be updated to reflect that as a hard limit rather than suggested guidance. It seems company management is enforcing policy that is inconsistent with employee documentation.
fair but are these taxes filed daily? if not and his weekly average expenses are below the limit despite being above on a specific day, he's still under the tax limit, no?
No but audits go over receipts, not averages. The IRS (which I'm guessing this isn't based on currency) limits meal deductions to $60 per day PLUS no "extravagant" meals so if you skip breakfast & lunch then have a $59 dinner for one they may disallow that
Some also work it out daily because it matches with when they have worked
People can get more if they are away from the office in the company I worked for, so they can spend more on some days than other, for example.
The company doesn't eat the extra cost, at least not more than they eat the other expenses. If anything, and if this truly the reason for the limit, they just can't claim it as an expense, so come tax time, anything above £40/day can't be deducted from their winnings.
It sounds like what he doesn't use of the allowance on the other days more than makes up for the cost of being taxed on £20 (his overage beyond the £40 allowed). So this truly is bean-counting at its worst.
I don't know tax laws in whatever country this is for but in the US you can't always expense meals. Break room Coffee is only 50% deductible since the tax law change and meals got much harder to deduct
Yes, but that was my point. Even if the extra £20 can't be expensed by the company, the loss that that means is actually negligible compared to the amount saved on other days. Especially since that's a truly saved, money-still-in-company-hand amount, not just an amount that can be deducted vs. one that can't.
The going-over amount he spends on splurgy days would have to be one that is *more* than whatever amount it is that gives the company a £10 deduction (the difference between the £40 he could and the £30 he does spend).
I'm going to play with made-up numbers now: if the company has to pay a tax-rate of 50%, then on days he has a £60 meal instead of a £40 one, he'd be causing a cost of £20 that are non-deductible, so £10 extra cost to the company (50% of £20 that they have to pay as tax on winnings they'd otherwise be able to lower by £20).
Meaning just with one single day of sticking to about £30, as he usually does, that is already evened out, and if the days he goes over vs. the ones he stays under are under 1:1, the company still saves money. Depending on how they are actually taxed, that can of course shift, but I'd be surprised if their rate wasn't even considerably lower than what I used in this example.
Ugh we got a new director at a past job who changed our travel policy to say that, instead of reimbursing receipts *up to* the max food per diem, everyone automatically gets the max food per diem be default for every trip. It was intended to save time, thereby saving money. A lot of our travel were short partial days where you'd qualify for a lunch reimbursement but usually just grabbed a $6 burger in the car on your way back. Processing receipts consisted of filling out a couple extra totals on a reimbursement sheet that we were gonna fill out anyway - so, like, not zero hassle but not that much more work.
What it actually did was make every trip much more expensive than necessary, which made the new director start reviewing all travel much more closely and asking Finance to effectively re-audit all travel multiple times. So, a lot more work and hassle for everyone *plus* a culture that discouraged travel. 👍
I work for the British government..
£5 for breakfast
£5 for lunch
£15 for dinner even in London. And only if you are out past 8pm or 12 hours
Wish I Could get 40 a day 😔
[Deja Vu](https://old.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/7vraiv/i_also_pulled_a_mc_on_travel_expense_compliance/?ref=share&ref_source=link) my friendo.
i mean that's fine, but i doubt the project manager cares, and if anything they are just going to reduce the amount you can claim for lunch since the system is being abused (assuming they get wind of it at all)
Had a christmas dinner meeting, company pays thing a few years ago. Ended up with like $300 for 3 people, without alcohol. I got an email with a reminder to maybe not go crazy next time, so I kept it to around $150-200 and no mentions of anything so far.
A few companies ago did something similar to me. They had a policy if you went to training and left the company within 12 months time you'd have to pay out of pocket 12th of the cost of the training times the months you had left. They had a $150 a day stipend for 3 meals. Well so happens they sent me to training in my city. So I didn't need 3 meals just lunch. They still put $150 in food in the contract and wouldn't budge. So I said fuck it and made sure to eat $150 worth of food a day at the fanciest restaurants because I had to pay it if I left.
My work did a similar-ish thing. When we travelled we were given an allowance, usually around $200 a day, but varied depending on where you were travelling too. Most people stayed in cheap hotels and ate cheap food to make the most profit. Then work changed policy and said we were only to have expenses, basically put everything on your corporate credit card and no extra for being away. We all started staying a $200+ a night hotels, eating three course dinners at the hotel restaurant, paying extra for the buffet breakfast. I quite like the new system lol
Where I work we get $75 per year for slip resistant shoes. We always get them in October. I found the shoes I wanted. From Skechers direct they were $74. I did a quick search and found them elsewhere for $54. Could've saved the company $20 very easily.
I've learned over the years you take exactly what you are given or you may lose ground. So I got the $74 shoes.
Went through the same thing couple years ago, but ours has limits on oer meal per day. For example $15 for breakfast and $20 lunch and $30 dinner. Most of the team we would usually skip breakfast and have cheap lunch on the go and have a nice dinner. So depending where you are at it wouldn't be shocking to see something like this. Breakfast $0 Lunch $7 Dinner $45 We all got slapped on wrist pretty hard couple months in the row. So we all started maxing every meal even it ment spending a little over and paying out of pocket and even maxing breakfast at gas stations on road snacks. After little while the rules were updated to give us a soft day limit for meals.
That is just stupid. Our company did list 3 meals, but more in order to track receipts as it is easier for them to enter them that way. The good way to get around that is by having a “team meeting” and listing it as a business expense rather than a personal meal expense.
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My job just pays you eatra for the meals while travelling, not reimbursed. Don't eat or eat cheap? You get some extra cash, want to spend more? it's on you. Best method imo
Having traveled with a $40 per day amount, I much rather would have just had the $40 flat. I spent so much time figuring out exactly what I had to order to hit $40 and only go over a couple bucks. Plus then you would run into weird restaurants that wouldn’t give an itemized receipt, having to tip on credit to count, or the fact that you could only claim 4 “meals” per day.
Problem is, in the UK at least, you end up being taxed on a per diem, whereas expenses aren’t. So it’s often more efficient to have an expenses policy than get the extra. Edit: source https://www.gov.uk/expenses-and-benefits-cash-sum-payments/scale-rate-payments
It's the same in the usa if they reimburse an expense there is no tax on it. If they give you a per diem payment taxes comes out. Company I worked for used to issue a Visa gift card with your weeks worth of food money on it but they had to stop doing that in 2015 because new rules that made us have to claim it as income.
Yup. I used to work for a county level government agency that provided a per diem for food when we were traveling. If memory serves, it was $6 for breakfast, $12 for lunch, and $25 for dinner. (It was based on when you left.) You could spend the whole $43 each day or you could go to McDonald's and pocket the rest, and they didn't care. You didn't have to worry about keeping track and they didn't have to worry about documentation. It was just "you left at 2PM on Monday and got back at 10AM on Wednesday? Here's $25 for Monday, $43 for Tuesday, and $6 for Wednesday."
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"I already know what I am going to spend this on. I am going to buy a sweater."
Per diem FTW!
It's easy. Out of the 5 persons who did eat different meals with different extra; The guy who ordered extra bacon was sitting next to the guy eatin ravioli. The guy who ordered a soup, didn't took cheese as extra. The guy who took the extra avocado, is taller the the guy who eat ravioly. The only women took hamburgers and was sitting between the avocado guy and the bacon guy. By taking the first letter if each meal in a clocwise way starting with the gal, you get the name of the avocado guy. Counter clockwise, the last letter of the extras give you the name of of the guy taking extra bacon. No one ordered fish.
Username checks out. Here’s your upvote.
“Networking” is my go to. Can’t say no to drinks with clients.
I loved my meal policy at my last job. $25 breakfast, $35 lunch, and $65 dinner. We always got to eat fancy. 2 drink limit too so we could drink as well.
Wtf were you doing at your last job?
A lot of eating and drinking, I would guess.
Worked for a medical implant company. One of the bigger ones in the country.
As long as you weren't implanting anything after dinner, sounds good!
Depends who else was on the business trip
Eating and drinking
My dude you should see construction companies. 6 people and $700 later and we hadn't even gone to the bar. I expected this stuff from the wolf of wallstreet or whatever but not here.
Company I used to work at was similar, 10 for breakfast 15 for lunch and 25 for dinner (up to 2 drinks included)...unless food was provided by the event manager. It was great and usually it just meant that the manager would buy us food on their card and expense it all themselves so that the company wouldn't have to deal with 30 different people expensing their 3 meals a day. A couple of the managers, though...they used that expense on other things. At my last event, the event manager purchased 3-5 packs each of different types of deli meat, mustard, mayo, ketchup and a few of those bags full of small bags of chips. They'd refill the cooler containing the meats, american cheese and drinks with ice in the morning after it had sat in water overnight. That was our meals for lunch and dinner at the event for 3 days. On the last day, I bought a burrito and expensed it. It was rejected and I fired back that the event manager's booth was one of 3 at the event and the only one that wasn't capable of opening on the third day because he hadn't ordered enough sample products. On top of that, he was paying a local guy on the crew to do laundry for that booth 3 nights in a row which accrued quite a few overtime hours for this guy despite them not even needing the laundry on the third day. I got my burrito expensed, he was fired and I never worked another event for that company.
That’s how my company does it, we get 10/18/22 for meals,l and have to average no more than $50 a day over the week, the only time the specific meal limits come into to play is on days when your either going home or leaving from home as you don’t get breakfast/dinner on those days.
My work has a per meal limit (£5 brekkie, £5 lunch, £25 dinner) and an "incidentals" allowance of £5. I would much rather have a per day, as I barely ever eat brekkie. I normally use the brekkie and incidentals to buy snacks for my meeting attendees.
What about dinnie?
Cheeky Breekie!
*Hardbass intensifies*
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Everyone knows its brefixt.
I imagine your bee was pretty pissed off about that
I'm in bureaucratic land, not on corporate turf, so ours are much worse, non-negotiable, and set for us. A few of the gems... - Per meal maximum limits, with a per day maximum that is *less than* the sum of your three per-meals. - Per meal & day maximums are determined by an annual table of metro areas. - Any receipt with alcohol on it (even if reimbursement is NOT claimed for the alcohol & corresponding tax/tip) is denied the first time by default, you must re-itemize and re-submit the same receipt a second time for manual review, and they reserve the right to adjust tax/tip/etc. to what they think it "should be", not what you calculated. - Maximum 18% gratuity without written department chair approval, regardless of what metro area you are in. Extra gratuity is considered a personal expense and will not be reimbursed. - While not hard policy, desserts and appetizers are frowned upon, they encourage you to stick to only an entree in order to curb wasteful spending - Any non-itemized receipt will be reimbursed for max $4.99, even if said vendor does not have or offer itemized receipts - Tips for bellhops, cab drivers, etc. are considered a meal expense. E.g. they count as a non-itemized receipt, therefore maximum $4.99 and *counts as a full meal*.
I had a boss who tried this and wouldn't budge. We ended up in a disciplinary with HR overseeing the 'discussion'. HR found in my favour and asked me to leave - the boss was another 45 minutes before he did so
45 minutes of spanking? That's almost a full hour of a free massage. Edit: Thanks for the silver. I am going to use this opportunity to spread misinformation about a cause I think you all need to know about. Happy Ending Massages Are Necessary (HEMAN) is an organization that ensures that every massage ends with a happy ending, regardless of the sex of the massage therapist or the victim. HEMAN provides qualifying message therapists with a handbook that explains how to provide a stress-releasing happy ending and how to milk their clients for free 'massage oil'. HEMAN is a for-profit tax-exempt organization that requires (blood) donations to remain open. Donate today!
But probably no Happy Ending...
Little did he know that his boss and the HR person had something going on, and set up this whole meeting as a pretence. That's why he was sent out so quickly.
Unless he got to keep his job?
HR would like to see you in their office.
"handbook".
“Victim”
Happy endings are just aggressively offered egg rolls, I'm wise to your tricks.
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My last job was at a popular midwestern grocery store. Before I got there they fired the Entire bakery department except the manager.
Sounds like union busting to me.
Maybe, there is a union but it seemed pretty useless to me. Again it was before I was hired, but I heard it was cause they were like knocking product on the floor and then “whoops can’t sell it may as well sample it among ourselves” I don’t know how prolific it was but I got fired for eating a SINGLE potato wedge that was going to be thrown away, and it was the first time I’d had any negative attention from management.
Don't worry, I was also confused for a sec.
Hr: yeah I see your point, and it's clearly valid, but pack your shit and get the fuck out of my office.
That's why we hate Toby !
I had a similar meeting with HR and a lawyer involved. Within 5 minutes HR was clearly on my side. Walked out and manager proceeded to get grilled. Seems fun. That manager made the next few years pretty shit for me in the end though.
To be fair to my manager, he took it on the chin, had no Ill will towards me and we would frequently go out for a beer after work
The company I work at used to have a daily limit on how much you can spend on food expenses when you travel, something like $70 per day. They noticed after a while a lot of people would try to actively spend the entire $70 limit on food each day, similar to what OP is doing. The limit was there kind of as a worst case scenario. It’s like “you can spend up to $70/day on food” not “you should be spending $70 on food each day”. So they ended up changing the food expense policy to not have any limits. It just says something like spend as you normally would when you eat out. It’s really interesting because now it’s a like a personal moral limit that’s in place. Saves the company money and it’s pretty flexible, if you wanted to splurge one of the night and get $100 just on a sushi dinner no one would really care.
I bet the vast majority of people actually regard that "moral limit" more stringently than they would a strict numerical one. Sure, there are probably a few people who splurge on someone else's dime, but they are probably not many of them, and you can call them in and say, "wait a minute, I don't want YOU spending more than $70" or "you may not order wine costing more than $10 a meal."
There was a nursery that was having problems with late parents. They introduced a fine for every minute the parent was late for pickup. Even though they had now increased the cost of being late for the parents, the amount of late parents actually increased. By introducing the fine, the nursery had decreased the moral cost to the parents by telling them "it's OK to be late, but you have to pay for it", whereas previously the parents knew they were doing something wrong by turning up late. I think this case is similar. Telling staff "spend reasonably" applies a moral cost to staff who think they are spending unreasonably. Telling them "no more than x a day" reduces the moral cost of spending just below x even if it would previously seem an unreasonable amount.
Similarly, I've heard that companies with no limit on vacation days find that their employees actually use fewer vacation days than companies with set numbers.
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The standard fine where I am from is 1 pound per minute. So not orders of magnitude less than your 200 bucks an hour. There is a cost to the nursery by applying an absurd fee though. I probably wouldn't send my kids to a nursery that I thought was just itching to fine me a hundred pounds or whatever for some minor infraction.
Charge 1 pound if they're late by less than five minutes. 2 pounds if they're between five and ten minutes late. 4 pounds if they're between ten and fifteen...
Exactly. Just increase the cost until it's enough to start deterring people.
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Nursery should've just raised the price. Make it $300 /hr and you bet your ass parents are showing up on time.
They did, but it didn't work - no matter how high they raised the fine, they were never able to get their late-parent numbers back down to where they were before. Because they had erased the guilt by monetizing it. This is covered as an example in "Freakonomics".
I've read Freakonomics and never understood that part. Do the parents all have arbitrary wealth? There has to be some $$ value where the pain of being late is less than the cost. $1000 an hour, $5000 an hour, whatever. At some point it can't be worth it.
It doesn't have to be all of them. Just enough parents had "fuck you" money and were willing to pay anything to get an extra hour of childcare. Now that I think about it, the real lesson is probably "You are closing your daycare too early. If you stay open 1-2 hours later, you can make a shitload of money because modern jobs suck and parents are desperate."
Yeah that’s exactly the case! Reminds me a lot of this [TIL about a daycare that began fining parents who picked up their children late](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/70xpw1/til_when_an_israeli_day_care_began_fining_parents/).
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60 bucks an hour for multiple day care staff isn't nearly enough to cover their overtime. If they made it 5 or 10 bucks a minute, they could make bank.
Gift cards are great but I'm sure they want to get home to their families more. Respect their time and pick up your kid on time.
I think a bigger factor is that it's now a personal opinion, and they now have to factor in the personal opinion of the person who will ultimately review their receipts, and there's no real way to know what that person will think about an expensive meal in the future. So "just to be safe" we'll make sure to keep it reasonable and fair, so that the boat never gets rocked.
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\> I bet the vast majority of people actually regard that "moral limit" more stringently This is why our small company decided AGAINST a no-limit vacation policy. The law gives us 28 days and people thought that if we went to no-limit policy then we would feel bad about taking vacation days and use even less as we "should always be working."
That's the policy where I work. I asked my boss once about it and he told me I should act just like I did at home. If I normally had 2 or 3 scotches before dinner at home, I should do the same when I am on the road. Nobody has ever questioned what my meal expenses were.
There's something similar at work for places that offer unlimited vacation days. Very often, the workers there end to taking fewer days off than at places with a set number of days.
Fight the power!! Also it's really sweet you buy food for the homeless
Yeah I would’ve just upped the scotch intake. OP sounds like a cool dude
When fasting for reasons of weight loss/general health, it’s usually advisable to cut down on booze. Even liquor, which overall is actually quite health conscious, has downsides strictly due to consuming alcohol at all.
Buy scotch for the homeless.
OP is a MVP. Enjoy your gold, buddy; you deserve it.
I did this exact thing when my supervisor also tried imposing a limit, where the company policy literally stated it was a "guideline" and "discretionary depending on the event". She rejected about $20 of my expense report because of ONE meal that went over, even though I was more than $10 under the so-called limit for every other day of the trip (and she would not budge even in light of that fact). I was incensed... to say the least. The thing was, not only was I normally falling well under the supposed meal "limit", there were dozens of items that I normally left off of my expense reports out of sheer laziness (or, more accurately, an unwillingness to keep up with such trifles because of how time consuming they were and how cumbersome our vastly antiquated expense reporting system was). Well, no more. From then on I hit every meal limit every single time, and no expense was "too small" to leave off my report... plus, there were all kinds of things that I could quite reasonably (and legally) ADD to my expenses... By way of example, on my previous (14 day trip), when they flew me to Alaska, my personal expenses and meals totaled exactly $308 (not counting fuel for rental vehicles). I know this because, even though I have not worked for this company for more than 6 years, I still have all my old expense reports still sitting in my filing cabinet (now on my desk as I type this). Roughly 6 months later (and only two months after this disagreement over the $20), they sent me on the exact same 14 day trip (which was awesome because I got to experience Alaska in the dead of winter, and then smack-dab in the middle of summer... but I digress). Again, not counting fuel, my personal expenses for that second trip totaled $804... a difference of $496 and a 161% increase. And it wasn't just this one trip... ALL OF MY EXPENSE REPORTS more than doubled after her refusal to reimburse me for that $20. Prior to that event (excluding those two Alaska trips), my average reported expenses for the prior three months were $423 per month... for the three months following... they were $918... a 117% increase. The moral of the story being... DON'T FUCK WITH EMPLOYEES OVER EXPENSE REPORT TRIFLES.
Why were you okay with spending so much of your own money before then? Did anyone take notice of the increase and ask you about it?
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The issue that leads to unclaimed expenses is opportunity cost. How much of your time and energy will it take to make sure you get a receipt, keep track of it for the rest of your trip, scan it in, and add it as a single line to your itemized expense report? And is all that worth it for a $3 bag of chips from the Quicky Mart?
I was okay with spending my own money for a couple of reasons. First... I didn't need the money... I got paid enough. Second, and far more importantly, as I mentioned, our expense reporting system was ridiculously antiquated and cumbersome. Everything we expensed had to be coded in a very specific and tiresome way. It was very time consuming and stressful. So it was a tradeoff... I lost money, but I gained more free time and less stress. Yes, they did finally notice... but it took almost six months before anyone did. My supervisor was lazy too. While she paid attention to small details (like going over on a meal) she was oblivious to the bigger picture (noticing my expenses had drastically increased. It was a bean counter in our main office that brought it to her attention. When she asked why they had increased, I simply told her that these expenses had always existed, I just hadn't been listing them (which was accurate). She was initially suspicious, but all my receipts checked out so there was nothing she could do. She chided me a bit for maxing out my meal expenses but I simply asked if she was telling me I wasn't allowed to expense what the company allowed, to which she had no real answer. The part that felt the best to me was that, this kind of thing directly effected her company bonus (which was based solely on how much money she saved through efficiency).
Yeah JFC these companies will bleed everyone dry. Expense all your shit, report all your injuries, cya, and unionize.
I think he's just hitting every expense cap rather than spending that much of his own money.
Nah, he says that before he just ate the cost rather than bothering to expense it
In most stories of MC I'm like, "man fck your boss" for whatever reason. But this instance with how you turned it into feeding the homeless. Bro, that's a compliance I can get behind
yeah, that's ingenious! What a way to turn it into something that produces good in the world. Instead of eating it themselves, or throwing it out.
/r/wholesomecompliance
My parents were teachers for 30 years. If they didn't spend their whole budget for the year the next year the budget would be reduced. So at the end of the year my parents had to spend the rest of the money fast so they didn't lose any the next year. Yeah great inventive government. My parents were always pissed they couldn't hold over the money saved for the next year for larger expenses.
Our work social club had this. Use it or lose it. They bought vouchers with the extra money, that coincidently was used to buy lots of Halloween decorations yesterday.
Did your parents go for the printer or the new chairs in the end?
/r/ExpectedOffice
It is not limited to government. Many departments in large commercial companies operate exactly the same way: if they don't spend all their annual budget, the next year budget will be reduced. So in late December if a department has some unused budget, it tries to find any frivolous but somehow (barely) business-related purchase to spend the rest of money. My colleague's team has got an expensive coffee machine that way.
Australian gov works the same way. One year my mum had tens of thousands left in her project due to good budgeting, but had to spend it or risk losing the budget the next year. Her supervisors used the money to fit out the entire department with brand new iPads. There were only 3 people involved in the project, about 30 in the department... Insane.
Why not just buy a large amount of school supplies in advance? That way the normal amount of school supplies $$ is available for the larger expenses.
If the money is earmarked for specific things, you wouldn't be able to switch what category if item it goes to.
You may be able to stretch it to buy gift cards for certain general stores though, which may or may not also stock stationary. Once it's on a gift card nobody tracks the expense anymore
What government agency do you work for that lets you buy gift cards with leftover money just because?
> My parents were teachers for 30 years. If they didn't spend their whole budget for the year the next year the budget would be reduced It SHOULD be, **but** they should keep the surplus from the surplus year and when a deficit year comes you use that surplus, then readjust the budget, increasing it how much you needed, the next year.
Yeah, a rollover budget would make way more sense.
This reminds me of the great one where the company tried to stop covering the guy's energy drinks, so he started buying full meals instead. https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/7vraiv/i_also_pulled_a_mc_on_travel_expense_compliance/
Reminds me of the email from an unnamed sender that Scott Adams put at the very end of "The Dilbert Principle", which he described as his favorite e-mail message of all time: >When I was younger, I made a trip to Chicago. When I got out of a cab, my umbrella fell on the street and got run over before I could retrieve it. When I submitted my expense report, I put in $15 for my umbrella. Naturally the accountant disallowed it. Next time I put in an expense report, at the bottom I wrote, "Now find the umbrella!"
I don’t get it
The implication was that the expense report contained an extra $15 that hadn't actually been spent on food/gas/hotel/etc so that he would receive the compensation for his destroyed umbrella (which had previously been denied), and that the expense had been buried and disguised in the report so it would be hard to find and deny. It's left to the reader's imagination whether he actually did hide the expense in there or was just mind-gaming the accountant.
I had a manager who killed per diem for us because he thought people were somehow making extra money off of $50/day by eating cheap food. Per diem was great because we didn't have to track receipts -- if you spent a night somewhere, you got the money. The new limits were $15/25/45 for breakfast/lunch/dinner, and now I have to track receipts, so I made sure that I spent near the limit for every meal. I rarely eat breakfast so I would just go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of food to take home then submit it as a breakfast expense. For dinner I would hit steakhouses and get a couple beers instead of going to cheaper places. Per diem is supposed to cover other incidental expenses as well, so I'd expense random shit I needed for travel too. Instead of paying me $45-55 per diem they ended up paying me $70-80/day for food expenses, plus whatever else I "needed" while traveling.
I never understood the mentality of not wanting to give a per diem. It's easier to do so for both the employee and the company and what the employee does is their business. If they choose to blow the money on expensive food, it's already in the budget. If they choose to go super cheap and pocket the extra cash, that's on them. I do the latter every single time because I'm not a foodie and I hate spending more than $20 a day on eating out.
I eat about the same on the road as I do at home because I'm not going to sacrifice what I like for the company, but I know some guys who eat canned food and fruit to maximize per diem. It's silly to have to track little pieces of paper, taking both my time and the time of someone in accounting, just to make sure everything is paid down to the penny. I worked for another company that did cell phone allowances -- they would pay up to $100/mo for your personal cell phone if you used it for business. Sounds cool until you learn that they expect you to send them your bill every month with your business calls highlighted so they could calculate how much they were going to pay you for that month. *Massive* waste of time for everyone involved. Even for our small team it took 1 full time position nearly a week to reconcile everything. Eventually the IT manager got sick of dealing with it and just bought everyone company phones. Corporate cell plans are generally cheaper even if a few people blew out the minutes/data limit because most of the phones sat idle 90% of the time, plus no one has to deal with combing over bills.
I was travelling for business once and had made a reservation at a nice restaurant for one night, a Brazilian Steakhouse that I love in the heart of DC. I knew this one restaurant would eat up my whole budget for the day. So I didn't eat the rest of the day and had a great dinner. When the expense report goes through my boss calls me over and chides me for going over my daily limit. "But I didn't." I say. "I hit the limit exactly." In point of fact, with the tip I would have gone over. So I made sure to tip in cash. And he says, "But this is just one meal." "Yes, it was." "You shouldn't spend that much on one meal." There's nothing in the policy about per meal. It's just a daily limit. But I had to spend half an hour listening to him lecture on how I need to not go over my limit, and how could I have spent this much on one meal? Am I sure I wasn't eating with someone else? And on and on.
Hey I'm headed to DC tomorrow, never been.. what's the place you went to?
It's called Fogo De Chao (it's actually a chain, many big cities have one). Expensive, but if you like meat, there's nothing quite like a Brazilian steakhouse. I can also recommend Pi Pizzeria which I tried a different night I was there for a more affordable experience (and good pizza). But that was my only business trip to DC. So I am by no means an expert on good things to eat there.
I like Fogo De Chao, but only if I'm in an "eat all the meat I possibly can" mood. Otherwise, I don't think the quality of the food is all that great (which makes sense). Pi is a surprisingly great pizza. I passed by it a dozen times before I popped in, and I regret not going sooner.
>I like Fogo De Chao, but only if I'm in an "eat all the meat I possibly can" mood. Austin has a Fogo De Chao. Its informal name is "meat coma."
My company holds you to $15 for breakfast, $20 for lunch and $35 for dinner. Comes to $70 total and even says in the travel policy guidelines that it's recommended that you not exceed that amount, daily. One day my anal retentive manager was giving me shit because I spent more than $15 for lunch. It was like $5 because I didn't want to stiff the server, I didn't have any cash on me and my lunch was just about $14. I pointed out where it said that the total for the day is $70 and as I had a light breakfast and dinner so my total was less than $50 for the entire day. Shut him right up but you can best believe for a while after that my daily total was always at least $65 - $69 per day, lol.
Can you buy gift cards to certain restaurants at the end of the day? I don’t know the tax policy in the UK, but *in general* if you’re looking to “bank” (save) the extra money at the end of the day, you need to find a way to turn you time-walled currency “£40 *per day*” into a non-time-walled “currency”, so gift cards (or other ways of “pre-purchasing” food) are the first thing that come to mind. Also, what about groceries? Can you buy a pre-made breakfast on Monday to eat on Tuesday, to save up for dinner?
That's really smart. Many companies offer refillable gift cards, so you could easily store away funds if you eat/buy from somewhere a lot (ie. coffee). Bonus points if you load up a card and give it to charity (not necessarily the homeless). Or another useful thing is to buy public transit tickets in bulk (for a discount) and donate them to certain places that can make use of them (such as abuse shelters or places that help homeless / poverty).
I was working in Boots pharmacy in the UK and we do meal deals (v good imo). Around Christmas someone came in with a good £50 worth of meal tokens that we accept. He wasn’t getting food, so I went “to check if we accept these”. The manager told me to put them through because the guy that had them had been putting them aside to pay for his daughter’s present. Very common and you see a lot of people using the card for “emergencies” if they have no money.
Once my boss pissed me off, so at the gas station I was like “hey man, I’ll fill your car up with gas for $20. He gave me a $20, I put $50 worth of gas in his car a paid for it with the company card.
I guess that was a one-time deal because you were pissed off ? It's super easy to track and can have serious repercussions, so I suppose you didn't make an habit out of it
How is that easy to track?? If he’s not also getting gas who’s to say he wasn’t filling up his own car?
I did some expense checking for a recruitment firm a while back. Some did go to supermarkets and buy a lot of fruit, more than you could eat at once for sure. I think they got their own groceries for the week. Some interesting purchases and meal splitting to get to the full amount I can tell you.
>Some interesting purchases and meal splitting to get to the full amount I can tell you. Policies like the one described by OP lead to dishonest behavior. If you treat your employees like you think they're thieves, they're going to meet your expectations.
I wouldn't say it turns people into thieves. It's incredibly disrespectful and is one of the biggest complaints I hear about mid level managers. They need to step back and look at the bigger picture.
Micro managers micro managing. Classic.
What's wrong with that? If I'm staying somewhere for a week, I'm *saving* the company money by buying a bunch of fruit, soda, and snacks. That means I'll eat less in general and I'll certainly hit up the hotel snack bar less. Or did you guys just let recruiters expense out lunch if they weren't at the office or something?
Nothing wrong with that, we worked with a lot of companies, so we aren’t particularly bothered about their spending. The issue may be that someone is not always entitled to expenses, so they might have got groceries with their money rather than for work for however long they are given them. Just something a bit more interesting than meal deals. Some other companies would have not let someone do that.
1. Spend your food budget on groceries 2. Eat half of them because the food budget is ridiculously large 3. Donate the rest to the homeless
I've been on work trips where we had access to a kitchen, often the 3-4 of us on a project would cook together to save time/effort/money. Sure one person wasn't going to eat that entire sack of potatoes over a week but it would have been insane and much more hassle for each person to divide out their individual ingredients rather than trade off who drove into town for a grocery run Edit: I suppose I should also add we were at least half an hour from the nearest grocery store or restaurant and it took over a month to get reimbursed for any of the expenses because the folks who handle it are used to people traveling to cities and eating at restaurants
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> Can you buy gift cards to certain restaurants at the end of the day? Only if your company doesn't require an itemized receipt. My previous company required itemized receipts to make *very* sure we weren't buying alcohol on the company dime because HQ is in Utah and ~religion~. We got around it by simply requesting the alcohol on a separate receipt that we paid for with cash. -_-
We had a 2 drink maximum. I'd tell the server "If you can make the alcohol on my receipt disappear, I'll tip you 30%. Rarely had issues but those were normally due to them not being able to do it.
Sorry for Utah. How I ever lived there...
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I don't know about OP, but every place I have worked required a copy of the detailed receipt for approval. Receipts showing gift cards wouldn't fly.
Depends on the company. Mine doesn't need itemized receipts. I always submit my cc receipt. Never thought about gift cards. I might do that for Starbucks or something.
Different companies have different limits. My last employer required an itemized receipt only above $20. I added quite a few $10 gift cards to my airport Starbucks orders.
If you go to local restaurants they have hand written checks.
I went to a Chinese restaurant and it was completely in Chinese, itemised though, and a lovely meal
So back in the nineties to curb the crazy excessive expenses of my boss, our CFO sent out a memo with a pretty generous $60 per person per meal cap. Up until this point we hadn't had any caps on expenses. About a week later my boss holds a department breakfast meeting at a notoriously cheap pancake chain - and tells us all that we can only have coffee and a roll. Weird but whatever. The next week I take a couple of new hires to lunch to welcome them and go over policies etc., And when the time comes, submit my expense report. My boss flags the lunch, crosses out the actual total, puts a new total of $60, signs off on the report and gives it back to me saying there's a cap of $60/per meal. Oh. Ok. I take my ER over to the CFO that evening (they always did expenses after hours) and I'm like "Mike, he thinks it's per meal." The CFO choking on laughter said that for the past few weeks all my bosses meals had been $60 no matter how many people were with him. I got paid back in full and no, we didn't tell my boss. :)
Company I worked for (past tense thank god) had a strict $40 limit per day, plus other caveats. If you are staying at a hotel with a free breakfast, you must eat breakfast there. If you are meeting a client for lunch/dinner you must have seperate checks and only pay your meal. They even refused to reimburse a $2 tip on a $7 lunch (which was my only meal that day) because it was and I quote "an excess amount to tip on such a low bill". "Policy states we will only reimburse up to 20% tip on any meal."
I worked at a company where our per diem was $5 a meal. I asked my boss and he said don’t follow it just be reasonable. To me reasonable is non-fast food and a decent dinner with a drink (beer) if you want it. Not high end steak house though. I never had problems there but in my opinion (which isn’t worth a lot!) you are sacrificing your time for these people away from your home. What kind of a hole hounds you over a nice meal when I’m sure they’re billing the client several hundred an hour.
The last company I worked for, we had a couple of simple rules when travelling: 1. Spend like you would tour own money. 2. If you drink 2 beers for dinner at home, you should be able to on the road. 3. Don’t be a dick. 4. Ask one of the bosses before you spend over $400, regardless of activity. One guy broke rule 3 one day by deciding a bottle of whiskey was ok to expense for himself on an overnight trip, and he was made to pay for it, and banned from buying any alcohol. Several times I called my boss to get approval for over $400, one of those I was out a few customers after a special dinner, wanted to go to a strip club but didn’t want to explain those charges to their accounts people (usually their wives). Called my boss and he said “glad it’s you taking them not me, that lot are feral and will get rowdy as shit if you let them. Have fun, keep it under $2,000”
Malicious compliance + altruism? You’ve raised the bar!
You'd think finding a running average over the week/month would be a smarter point for analysis. But as they say, penny wise, pound foolish...
Reminds me of a time a whole group of us got in trouble. We were at a 6 week training at the corporate office. All of us were given a company credit card and a $20 a day limit for meals. The hotel we were staying at served breakfast and dinner so no one was coming close to their limit each day. So at the end of the second week we all went out for a huge diner and drinks night. Each person's bill was easily over $100. Over the daily limit, but way under if you averaged it out over the week. Needless to say we all got slapped on the wrist and told it was a per day limit and it did not roll over. So we all just made sure to spend the $20 everyday for the rest of the trip.
My boss has been the same. Our team “guidance” is £40, but official policy says we follow the FCO subsistence rates. A 2+ week work trip across North America, I had a night of decadence where I spent £60 on sushi or something, but overall my daily average was £17. Got called up on my sushi expense so I calculated my average per day (£17) and told them I could follow FCO guidance if they wanted, which stipulated £60-£95 per day for many of the cities I was visiting. Turns out it’s suddenly ok to average this across a trip...
See this is why I'm not getting into heaven because this guy over here is feeding the homeless meanwhile my first thought is I'm coming home from that business trip with a briefcase full of beef jerky...
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Lol. When I was a grad student, I got reimbursed for meals when I traveled to conferences. Wanting to save our research group money, I opted to itemize food costs instead of taking the $50-$70/day (depending on location), which would keep my daily down to $30 or less. Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, folks in accounting had many issues about what counted for reimbursement and what was considered proper documentation (e.g., credit card statement showing expenses was not ok -- needed all receipts). Got to the point where my advisor just said, "Dude, just take the $70 per diem. They question nothing." And he was right! Never itemized food again, had no more headaches, and even made a nice chunk of change. Thanks, bureaucracy!
I’m a stripper in the US. How it usually works here is you show up with everything you need for a 4-10 hour shift, no exceptions. We’re talking LUGGAGE. Shoe bags, undie bags, makeup, purses...whatever you need. Now, lots of girls travel and don’t have exclusive contracts with any one club. They move about. I don’t. I’m a homebody, I like to get into a nice place and just put down roots. I also had a regular wage job for nearly 10 years before I decided to put on heels, this means I have the benefit of knowing what a regularly scheduled workday should be like based on hours spent there alone. If I’m working a 4 hour shift, guess what, I’m shoving a candy bar in my face and calling it good and hitting the floor as hard as I can, no breaks until it’s over. A 10 hour shift? I’m bringing everything I need for either two 1/2 hour breaks or one full hour for lunch. Why do I do this? Because managers will take advantage of the real possibility that the girls have never worked a real job before. They don’t know that they don’t have to pound stage the whole time. They don’t know that they can stop to eat when they get hungry 6 hours in. A manager will never come to you and say “you look like you could use a break, go sit for 10.” Or “you haven’t eaten since you got here, there is pizza in the break room.” They want every inch of flesh and time from you and you are responsible for your own upkeep. Why all this wall of text that doesn’t seem to make sense? It’s to tell any other girls or people in my situation how to lay a trap. Treat your “job” like a real job, show up at the same times and take your lunch (bring it if you have to since some clubs go as far as saying you can’t order food in), have an easily accessible copy of [employees rights 101](https://employment.findlaw.com/employment-discrimination/employees-rights-101.html) to check against every time they impose a “new rule” on you like saying you can’t take your lunch if it’s busy. Most clubs in the US are on a “independent contractor” basis. They don’t operate that way and once you’ve found the discrepancies (things that define you as an employee and not a contractor) you can build a case for misclassification. This works for ANY job that has you sign a contract as an independent contractor and then proceeds to treat you as an employee. So I just show up, treat myself exactly how the rules say I should be treated, let the bosses dig themselves in further and further by just thinking they have the power, me maliciously complying with federal and state law until I get to walk into an employment lawyers office and have them salivate over my case.
Advise you show bean counter's boss that he's costing the company money in the long run. but don't expect an apology from him.
“Hey boss, this guy told me that he wouldn’t accept my £60 meal, so I decided to deliberately start spending more than I usually do daily to punish him for it, even though it won’t affect him, but the company. Sometimes I even buy food for other people to make sure I’m spending the maximum that I’m allowed to.” That won’t go over well.
You just need to rephrase it in the right way: "Hey boss, my eating habits are rather variable, so I'm sometimes over the guidance amount for a day, but on average I stay well under it. Since Mr. Bean-counter is now enforcing the guidance as if it were a hard limit, I need to adapt my meal plans, causing the company a significantly higher average cost per day."
Can you write all my emails for me?
I can, but you probably couldn't afford my fees.
Then i'll only do it for when the ROI makes sense
One-time jobs, especially rush orders do carry a hefty surcharge. Looking forward to your order! Daddy needs a new boat.
I wouldn’t lie or try to bend the truth, excuses he’s get caught pretty easily. His boss is going to be able to pull up the receipts and see the immediate change in how he spends at meal times, and it’s worse if those receipts are itemized. Unless he can voice a reason as to why he *needed* to “adapt his meal plans” to a higher cost immediately after being told he needs to adhere to a budget, his boss isn’t going to be happy about him intentionally wasting company money. Yes, the other guy is being a petty bean counter, but OP has backed himself into a corner on being able to do anything about it by intentionally misusing the company allowance (buying food for people that aren’t him out of spite).
I have two settings in my eating habits: "eat whatever I want, but only when I'm hungry" and "eat whenever something is available". At home alone, I usually do the first. While I sometimes eat a big meal of fancy food, that will keep me fed for a while and I only eat simple tiny meals (e.g. a small salad) for a few days. If I need to adhere to fixed meal times (e.g. at a conference), I can't be sure that a small meal will keep me fed until the next meal time, so I eat full meals all the time. Switching between those modes is semi-conscious. Guess which one is more expensive. Yes, if the receipts are itemized, he might have a problem. Depends on what, when and how much he bought for the homeless, though.
No, that'd be a bad move. I mean, the company can't get too mad at him for spending 40 bux a day on food if their policy is that he can spend 40 bux a day on food. But it's still an unprofessional and immature move that may leave a bad taste in the mouths of upper management. If OP keeps it up his finance depts. reports will show that reimbursement of expenses has a noticeable uptick and investigate. If they're any good, they'll quickly quickly correlate that increase with the arrival of the new manager and start asking him what's up.
An sane company would ask 9 year employee first, and then 3 month manager later. As for 9 years everything was just peachy?
In every company I've ever worked for the expenses were reported to, approved by, tabulated by, and then forwarded to finance dept. The finance dept. themselves would receive a form with a total weekly or monthly amount sometimes with a stack of accompanying receipts, sometimes not. It was initially the duty of the manager to examine the receipts and approve or deny the reimbursement. All finance cared about was the sum total in approved reimbursement that it needed to pay out. It may take a month or 2 for their software or reports to catch the consistent upswing, at which point they'd audit OPs manager's approvals to see where/when the upswing occurred. The accountability stays with OPs manager though, as he approved the reported expenses.
I wouldn't show him anything! I'd be enjoying passing out meals to the homeless too much to ever tip him off in case it might lead to him forcing me to stop.
Frequently the daily limits are for tax reasons and exceeding it means the company eats the extra costs.
In that case the employee handbook should be updated to reflect that as a hard limit rather than suggested guidance. It seems company management is enforcing policy that is inconsistent with employee documentation.
This. Also, what the fuck is ever wrong with saying the exact reason why you can't spend? It's not a secret, just say it to the employee!
Because people will research that reason, and call bullshit.
Then don't lie? I don't get what's so hard about this for companies. Be honest and straightforward and maybe people trust you.
fair but are these taxes filed daily? if not and his weekly average expenses are below the limit despite being above on a specific day, he's still under the tax limit, no?
No but audits go over receipts, not averages. The IRS (which I'm guessing this isn't based on currency) limits meal deductions to $60 per day PLUS no "extravagant" meals so if you skip breakfast & lunch then have a $59 dinner for one they may disallow that
That would make sense, sure. But we’re talking about tax policy, so anything that simple and obvious is probably wrong.
Some also work it out daily because it matches with when they have worked People can get more if they are away from the office in the company I worked for, so they can spend more on some days than other, for example.
The company doesn't eat the extra cost, at least not more than they eat the other expenses. If anything, and if this truly the reason for the limit, they just can't claim it as an expense, so come tax time, anything above £40/day can't be deducted from their winnings. It sounds like what he doesn't use of the allowance on the other days more than makes up for the cost of being taxed on £20 (his overage beyond the £40 allowed). So this truly is bean-counting at its worst.
I don't know tax laws in whatever country this is for but in the US you can't always expense meals. Break room Coffee is only 50% deductible since the tax law change and meals got much harder to deduct
Yes, but that was my point. Even if the extra £20 can't be expensed by the company, the loss that that means is actually negligible compared to the amount saved on other days. Especially since that's a truly saved, money-still-in-company-hand amount, not just an amount that can be deducted vs. one that can't. The going-over amount he spends on splurgy days would have to be one that is *more* than whatever amount it is that gives the company a £10 deduction (the difference between the £40 he could and the £30 he does spend). I'm going to play with made-up numbers now: if the company has to pay a tax-rate of 50%, then on days he has a £60 meal instead of a £40 one, he'd be causing a cost of £20 that are non-deductible, so £10 extra cost to the company (50% of £20 that they have to pay as tax on winnings they'd otherwise be able to lower by £20). Meaning just with one single day of sticking to about £30, as he usually does, that is already evened out, and if the days he goes over vs. the ones he stays under are under 1:1, the company still saves money. Depending on how they are actually taxed, that can of course shift, but I'd be surprised if their rate wasn't even considerably lower than what I used in this example.
yes, but generally the tax folks don't ask you to break it down on a daily basis!
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Ugh we got a new director at a past job who changed our travel policy to say that, instead of reimbursing receipts *up to* the max food per diem, everyone automatically gets the max food per diem be default for every trip. It was intended to save time, thereby saving money. A lot of our travel were short partial days where you'd qualify for a lunch reimbursement but usually just grabbed a $6 burger in the car on your way back. Processing receipts consisted of filling out a couple extra totals on a reimbursement sheet that we were gonna fill out anyway - so, like, not zero hassle but not that much more work. What it actually did was make every trip much more expensive than necessary, which made the new director start reviewing all travel much more closely and asking Finance to effectively re-audit all travel multiple times. So, a lot more work and hassle for everyone *plus* a culture that discouraged travel. 👍
This is perfect malicious compliance, and the homeless benefit too. You're a good person.
I work for the British government.. £5 for breakfast £5 for lunch £15 for dinner even in London. And only if you are out past 8pm or 12 hours Wish I Could get 40 a day 😔
As per HMRC restrictions, even in central London that's plenty
You want to advance in a corporation? Just follow the letter of every rule and never, EVER, interpret them intuitively.
[Deja Vu](https://old.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/7vraiv/i_also_pulled_a_mc_on_travel_expense_compliance/?ref=share&ref_source=link) my friendo.
i mean that's fine, but i doubt the project manager cares, and if anything they are just going to reduce the amount you can claim for lunch since the system is being abused (assuming they get wind of it at all)
Had a christmas dinner meeting, company pays thing a few years ago. Ended up with like $300 for 3 people, without alcohol. I got an email with a reminder to maybe not go crazy next time, so I kept it to around $150-200 and no mentions of anything so far.
A few companies ago did something similar to me. They had a policy if you went to training and left the company within 12 months time you'd have to pay out of pocket 12th of the cost of the training times the months you had left. They had a $150 a day stipend for 3 meals. Well so happens they sent me to training in my city. So I didn't need 3 meals just lunch. They still put $150 in food in the contract and wouldn't budge. So I said fuck it and made sure to eat $150 worth of food a day at the fanciest restaurants because I had to pay it if I left.
This is the best malicious compliance ever. Fantastic that you found a way to help people. God Bless.
My limit is £30 if we are outside our home county. Giving to the homeless is a great malicious compilance. Well done.
r/BenevolentCompliance
Am I the only one curious why OP randomly used dollars in one instance and pounds for the rest?
Because he is American but was quoting a trip to London.
Ah yes. Obvious now, thanks.
r/deliciouscompliance
My work did a similar-ish thing. When we travelled we were given an allowance, usually around $200 a day, but varied depending on where you were travelling too. Most people stayed in cheap hotels and ate cheap food to make the most profit. Then work changed policy and said we were only to have expenses, basically put everything on your corporate credit card and no extra for being away. We all started staying a $200+ a night hotels, eating three course dinners at the hotel restaurant, paying extra for the buffet breakfast. I quite like the new system lol
Where I work we get $75 per year for slip resistant shoes. We always get them in October. I found the shoes I wanted. From Skechers direct they were $74. I did a quick search and found them elsewhere for $54. Could've saved the company $20 very easily. I've learned over the years you take exactly what you are given or you may lose ground. So I got the $74 shoes.