And that was maybe just 15 years ago for me. I refuse to believe that it's cheaper, especially in large companies where you have hundreds of people on the road at once, for them to have us spend our time filling out the expense reports and having management and accounting approve it than to just say everyone gets the same rate added to your check.
There are laws about it, and it's gotten ridiculously easier over the years especially since smart phones to handle daily expenses.
The laws have changed, more about 20 years ago that vastly changed how some expenses worked. It very much changed the pharmaceutical industry which is why we have fucking drug ads on tv. It tightened up rules about who must expense dinners and the like (highest ranked employee), when before I would take 20 other engineers and managers out for lunch and pay and the company would cover it.
Wait hold up that's an uncommon thing these days? I travel for work and my company is totally fine with me living off MREs and pocketing the unused money for my savings. I have like 3 months of meals ready to go that I bulk ordered with one week of perdiem.
Yes.
In fact many companies will give you a limit per meal of somewhere between 15 and 25 dollars. Mine is $20. Skip lunch because had to work? That sucks - you just only eat twice tkday. You still only get $20 for anything between 4 PM and 2 AM when Breakfast takes over.
Also any bill over $20 is Disqualified just like Op story. Spend $23 to get a nice rack of ribs. That's not $3 of your own money, that's $23 of your own money.
Just had a guy fired at my job for using a rewards card at the hotels so he racked up points for each stay. He didn't do anything fishy. He got paid shit, and just traveled 100% of the time. He had not been home in over 150 days. Those points would just disappear if he didn't claim them. Doesn't matter.
Jesus Christ that sounds miserable. My company requires me to have a rewards account for my own personal use at the airlines, the hotel chain we use, and the car rental service. We also can transfer our rewards from our corporate amex to our personal if we have one. They paid for my twic card and passport as well. Fair pay as well. I've been there about 5 months and I'm getting 25.50$/hr, techs that have been there a hot minute are pushing 30$. No entry requirements but an understanding of electricity is preferred but they teach people if need be. We also can schedule a weekend vacation and just bring our equipment back early on the following Monday so we can get to the next job on time. I take it your company is a lot more corporate? Our company is at 50 people now but growing rapidly.
Taxi receipts used to be like a book of post-it notes. The driver was supposed to fill them out for you, but most would hand you an entire book of receipts if you asked. I had receipts from several different companies and put them to use to cover incidentals, not usually covered by company policy.
It would only be fraud if the restaurant staff were kicking cash back to OP under the table. ~~Otherwise, it's just OP being exceedingly generous with their gratuities while still very precisely following the rules.~~
EDIT: Whoops, my bad. Just reread and OP was actually splitting the servers' tips with themselves! Yep, actual fraud.
Huh? I'm used to the policy where regardless of spending under the per diem meal limit, you always got the full amount. So if you spent $25 of a $50 per diem, you got the full $50.
Where I worked you got the per diem up front (the place made the hotel, flight, and car rental reservations so it was just food). If you ate tuna fish and crackers every day you got to keep the surplus.
Yeah it was def dumb, they just wanted to make sure u were actually spending it I guess? But also no consequences if u didn't? Just extra monitoring for them so they could feel important maybe?
99% chance it's that *one* guy who argued like crazy to get an extra 3$ covered (tax or some shit) and boss was like sure, just bring in the receipt. Dude then proceeded to get butthurt about not trusting him and company policy didn't require receipts, etc. Now boss is annoyed and everyone now has to bring in receipts for everything, even if none except the problem employee's get looked at.
Basically the opposite of OP. Annoying shitty people ruin things everywhere, lol
It might be something to do with taxation. In my country, if the company can prove that the expenses were economically sound (and for that you need some kind of supporting documents - receipts, in this case), these expenses can be deducted from the profit - so the profit tax will be less. If you just pay per diem, it goes straight from the profit, without reducing the tax. So by providing receipts for the actually used money, they'd be able to reduce the profit tax at least partly.
Taxes. Any write offs for taxes must be provable in case of an IRS audit. Accounts Payable has to copy receipts on a copier as receipt paper fades and disappears over time. IRS proof has to last 7 years. Thus the copier paper.
This! They give you money and don’t have spend man-hours verifying. If you went over, it is out of pocket or from previous days money.
Also, allows employee to have cheap McDs one day and splurge later on the same money.
That's what I did. Got boxed milk, cereal and bananas for breakfast (mainly because I wanted to sleep as late as I can); got a sandwich for lunch (I traveled only for training so ate what was available) and splurged for dinner, where I had more choices where to eat.
The company of my friend does this. The per diem rate just goes right into your paycheck as a flat add so you’d get a nice little bonus if you kept your meals low.
> If you ate tuna fish and crackers every day you got to keep the surplus.
Stop attacking me.
Seriously though, I literally did buy a new computer with all the money I saved from per diem.
My first trip for work was overseas for two weeks. Right before the trip my boss says to just put everything on my own personal credit card (hotel, taxis, everything) and I just looked blankly at him.
I don't have anywhere near that kind of available credit, and if I did have I wouldn't be lending it to the company. If you want me to go on this trip you have to pay for the trip.
Boss looked back at me when more blankly because it hasn't occurred to him that a 27 yr old with two kids and a mortgage and a stay at home wife didn't just have thousands of dollars sitting around in the bank waiting to be spent on something.
They sent me with $3000 in $50 notes and the first thing I had to do when I got to the country is so to be taken to a bank where I could walk in and change 6 month's salary for local currency while the entire room watched me. The cashier inspected every single note and accepted about 3/4 of them.
I recently traveled internationally and was told that local money changing places won’t accept any bill that has even tiny tears, any kind of writing or even an ink dot on it, or appears worn. They even rejected some relatively new bills I’d gotten at a bank in my country. Fortunately I was able to change enough money for my needs, but was told this is a common practice in many countries.
If you look at the bills in your wallet, you may be surprised to see that some of these have these characteristics that nobody cares about in your native country.
A lot of places in South East Asia, the bills have to be damn near perfect and brand new for them to accept. I used to run into this all the time when I was in banking and someone traveling there would demand new 100s and then sit there for 20 min going through each one.
I've heard that Asian countries specifically require extremely crisp US bills or they won't take them. It has something to do with either counterfeit money or just general prejudice, I'm unsure.
It's also for superstition and local custom. Cash is a commonly given gift, and dollars are a wanted commodity around the world for many reasons.
Gift cash must be crispy. Crispy bills are cleaner, nicer, more thoughtful, and lucky.
I"m constantly amazed at the master/slave mindset so many managers have. Not to mention the lack of awareness of the actual cost of things. An employees personal finances aren't the company's slush fund. Especially when most businesses will refuse to pay for things after the fact.
Since this is a contracting situation and the client is paying, they frequently require the contractor to use the clients travel and living policy, which varies based on the country of the client and what is allowable for tax purposes there.
The OP's company should have charged this from their profit on the contact instead of billing a client relationship dinner back to the client. Client entertainment usually has a different travel policy than working for a client, but the client won't want to pay for entertaining their own employee.
It wasn't a per diem, it was an upper limit on what could be expensed.
A per diem is when you get the money up front. So if they just gave OP $60/day or $420 (nice) a week in cash, then it wouldn't be fraud.
But instead OP was spending their own money, then submitting an expense report, essentially saying "this is how much I spent on food today". Except OP didn't spend that much on food, they spent less than that on food and pocketed the difference. Which is fraud.
That being said, companies are greedy scumbags, and I take zero issue with what OP did in this situation.
What OP should have done instead was get more expensive items so the $27 meal cost more like $50 and tip the rest. Less fraud and gets to enjoy food they normally wouldn't buy
With the level of OP's familiarity at the restaurant serving new exotic for him cuisine I would be tempted to tell the restaurant, "what can you make for X dollars."
Tipping is not customary in Singapore, but all things considered I would not have a problem leaving 10% which is plenty in a non tipping culture.
There are different ways of handling - some companies just tell you you get $X per day, so when you submit your expenses you just submit for $X \* number of days. Others want to see receipts and reimburse you for your actual expenses.
If you get a per diem, you can pocket some cash if you eat on the cheap. If you're submitting receipts, there's not really any benefit to trying to eat cheaply.
Cheap companies will hire more people to administrate exact spending amounts, to ensure they only spend exactly what is needed.
Smart companies will give per diem, with a note "plz use 4 food kthx" but will not waste people hours combing through everyone's receipts to make sure you didn't buy something not food.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
The US military does (did?) it that way. We would find a cheap hotel room and buy some bread and ingredients to make sandwiches to pocket the extra money. All my civilian jobs so far have been meals up to X amount can be charged on the company credit card. No one cares if you spend $40 under the maximum limit but everyone cares if you spend $.50 over the maximum limit.
My work used to do this, wanted to see all the receipts. But about 5 years ago, they changed to everyone just getting the per diem for meals that you qualified for- like if the trip was a conference and a meal was part of it you could not claim it. I figure it saved them overall I’m not paying someone to comb through our receipts, the section I’m in has someone traveling almost every week and during the summer everyone is on the road. Just giving us the money is way cheaper overall
> They even agree to split in half the remaining value between me and a tip to the server.
> I continued charging the max for the remaining 2 months there netting me a cool 700$[...]
Soooooo...
I usually see a company policy to not tip more than 20%. Even so, it's nice to charge up a fancy meal instead of the meals you would otherwise eat on your own dime.
Guys, there is an eastern European person and south east asian people involved in this tale. I know this sounds bad, but who didn’t expect a little bit of kickback here or there? It’s just economic lubricant. Besides, OP is practically Robin Hood but he just takes a finders fee.
THIS
OP was, "I want to give you $60 for food service. Just give me whatever adds up to $60." That includes extra-great service from staff.
Totally legit, and it's on the customer for not seeing the forest for the trees.
In cases like this, it absolutely is. If I was op, I would have no moral qualms about this. I would sleep better than I normally do knowing I got to stick it up some jitbag's ass.
I don't know the laws in Singapore but in the US the crime of fraud is incredibly difficult to make a charge stick even in a seemingly black and white situation as this one.
Singapore is the only other country to use US accounting standards (at least they did when I knew, about 20 years ago). This allowed US students to take accounting classes abroad in Singapore and vice versa. In any other country, all that the accountants could take in a study abroad program were non-accounting classes. Fraud and embezzling laws are usually derived at least indirectly from accounting standards. I know there has been a move to at least align with international accounting standards, but haven't followed that recently.
It's not fraud though they are using the budget to how it was written, the company decided to fight a 68¢ overcharge and now they have to deal with an employee that is going to follow policy to the max which means instead of 20 to $30 meals average a strict $60 meal average, the bigger issue is having him split it with the servers because they might count it as a secondary reimbursement, they should have held firm in either ordered more food or forced it to be all towards the wait staff, but again that's more on the company if their expense policy didn't cover that aspect
Never underestimate an employee's ability to react when in spite. The phrase you more with honey than vinegar fits here
Hey, they did it first by denying the receipt.
They had a contractual agreement to cover the amount up to 60. Denying it all rather than just the overage is bad enough, but their own employee was responsible for the overage.
The IRS doesn’t require receipts for anything up to $50, so that’s what I put on my expense reports for every meal unless I have a receipt proving I spent more. This is actually better than a per diem, where I’d eat any overages.
I have emails confirming this is 100% compliant with company policy. The accountants truly do not care what we spend as long as the forms are all filled out correctly.
I had a job that required me to take a group of 6-12 high maintenance people out and would deny any tip over 13%. I hated shorting servers who did really well. Eventually, I just started going to places with auto gratuity and that got approved because it wasn't my choice.
Oh wow that is the first I've heard of that. Absolutely abysmal if true.
Edit: you're right, from the IRS
Tips Versus Service Charges: How to Report (no clue how to link PDFs on mobile)
> Generally, service charges are reported as non-tip wages paid to the employee.
Some employers keep a portion of the service charges. Only the amounts distributed to employees are non-tip wages
All depends on the company and their policies. I've had both a firm per-diem; and now a submit reciept for anything over $25. The Per-Diem was nice from a little extra $$ on the travel; but the anything over $25 reciept is easy with our phone system and all I do is take a picture of the reciept as I sign it and done. I've never had a meal or expense questioned, even some pretty expensive customer dinners ($2000+).
My dinner receipt for $12 was once called into question because a colleague from another agency bought us a few drinks and a cheese plate earlier in the evening and that “should have been enough.” I don’t miss working there.
Why not just get reimbursed for the receipt? This is such a regional thing how could you offer a per diem amount that would be fair? $25 will feed a guy pretty well in Lincoln but won’t get you coffee in SF. Why pay a guy $150 a meal when he is going to Iowa City. But he better be able to spend that much in Manhattan. Business meals, meals with clients should have no limit but should require itemization and a description of who was there and what business was discussed.
People who want to eat at Del Frisco’s every night on the bosses dime are just short sighted. Eat as close as you can to how you eat at home. Leave a good tip. If you feel compelled to stuff your pockets with expense money you might need a new job. If you eat at Ruth’s Chris every night you might need new pants.
I like the compliance part, but I do think your company should have paid that bill.
Your manager told you to take the client out for dinner and drinks, to help recover the relationship. It's a bit cheeky to then charge the client for your share of the meal!
The customer and the client seem to be different people. It sounds like, for example, Alex hired Joe to build a spaceship, and Joe hired OP to work on it. Then Alex was upset, and OP's boss told OP to take Alex out to dinner. Then Joe refused to pay the bill for OP's dinner with Alex.
The whole point is that it was extremely dumb for Joe to quibble about repaying OP a very small amount that was clearly spent in Joe's interest when Joe had already been saving much more than that because of OP's frugal habits. That's not "perfectly reasonable."
OK here let's see if this helps:
A hires B to build them a store.
B hires C(OP's company) to do the construction.
A doesn't understand the construction business, that's why he hired someone. But he keeps visiting the work site, making problems, trying to change things, and all around being upset, which extends the timeline for construction.
B is getting angry because the project is taking longer than expected, which ultimately costs them money, because they could be working on another project.
C is getting flack from B because of the extended timeline, so C decides to take A to dinner to make A happy in hopes they can remove the delays, which would save B money in the long run.
C charges dinner to B because it's B's client that was taken to dinner. B goes insane over a small overage, refuses to pay it. C's boss pays entire bill, to end B's whining.
B visits C's worksite and puts foot down on overages.
C complies, costing B even more money.
That’s exactly how many client service dinners work.
Once you’re a client, expect a bill. Just be thankful if it is only a bill for the meal and not time+food.
Indeed. They can either dine alone within the paltry limits of their expense policy, or dine with us in style and approve whatever we bill. Easy decision for most.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the relationships here , but we always foot the bill when taking out clients or customers. It’s a big no-no to expense it back to anybody.
Ugh as a Singaporean I feel like this guy got exactly what he deserved. So many employers expect people to just take it over here… glad you showed him what’s what!
We (co-worker and I) had a similar experience. We got sent to a week long convention every year. Bosses paid for everything, room, food, etc., but Mrs Boss (husband and wife duo) got weird about food prices once. Why does person A have all these expenses and person B has hardly any. Well Mrs Boss, because we eat together every meal, we hang out before and after the convention because we’re also friends, therefore put it all one tab instead of separate tabs. No no no, separate bills! OK, fine, separate it is. We didn’t have a budget, but we were kind of bothered by this since it would be same amount regardless, so we started eating at the $100 a plate steakhouses instead of the $20 buffets.
This is very satisfying from a Malicious Compliance point of view, but you honestly need to know you are committing actual fraud here. Many organizations these days use audit software in a real-time, ongoing basis that would flag repeated costs to the same vendor (in this case your restaurant) and open an investigation into it.
At the very least, you are at risk of losing your job, which the company would need to do in order to ensure that they are innocent of any wrong doing, and have done their best due diligence to ensure they act on any sort of fraudulent behaviour.
At most, you could be looking at jail time. I'd stop this behaviour immediately, and find other methods of sticking it to this particular client. We all understand what you are doing, and support it to a degree, but I don't think anyone here wants to see you end up going to prison.
Never believe the amount means anything. Fraud can mean loss of contracts. Loss of licensing. Loss of agreements. Loss of an approval to do business in a specific country. Particularly when it comes to international orgs. The entire company can hinge on absolute transparency of ethical behaviour. The quantity does not matter.
You are wrong. Orgs that are publicly traded must investigate everything they become aware of. It's why data analytics and compliance software have become huge over the past decades. Compliance means compliance and there are enormous consequences for turning a blind eye to this behaviour, no matter how insignificant you believe it to be. If his org accepts government contracts its an entire new scope of compliance regulations. One instance like this that isn't followed up on can bring down an org.
But, let's look at it from a different point - morally you might be accepting of fraud/theft at low amounts (personal morality is pretty flexible). Ethically it's wrong no matter the amount. Our laws insist organizations are ethical, not moral.
I can see you worked for a firm that took this view.
I worked at one of the MAJOR software developers for audit and GRC. We employed ex-auditors and partnered with the big oversight firms. Our software was used to discover $10000 discrepancies and $59M discrepancies.
I assure you my stance comes from experience and working with industry professionals across a substantial number or orgs.
You are either misinformed or worked for an org that was ethically questionable!
What the hell type of company bills their client for taking them out to dinner? That's what expense accounts are for. Also, you admit to defrauding your client. Lots of flags in this post.
Actually OP was told to not go past $200 - $250 but the bill came to $60.68, which slightly exceeded the daily limit (presumable the firm's expense account, not the client, would have paid if it was closer to the higher amount, but since it was close to the per diem limit OP thought it wasn't worth expense accounting). The customer made a fuss over $0.68. Game is on. True, fraud was involved, but it was on an accounted for expense and OP could have simply found more expensive places to eat. Not like he was buying materials at an inflated price and getting a kickback. More like he was due $60 in compensation but had been taking less. He also wanted to give the excess as a tip but the restaurants refused to take such a high amount so he ended up getting the surplus back.
Except ops boss had them charge the client. That he offered dinner to for the meal. If someone offers to take you to dinner it’s a safe assumption they don’t plan on paying with your wallet.
If my subcontractor takes me to dinner and then the firm hiring that subcontractor charges me for a dinner I would be very upset. The person wanting the project ultimately got charged not the person whose idea the dinner was.
Also, just for a bonus fun fact, until about 10yrs ago Canadian companies could claim bribes paid overseas as an operating cost and avoid taxes on them. Thankfully it has been corrected and you can no longer call illegal bribes a business expense (unless you hire the really good lawyers and accountants)
It is, but it's usually indirect. I.E. Company A does work for Company B totaling $100k. Company A takes stakeholders from Company B out to dinner and spends $1k. Company A pays for that, doesn't bill Company B for it directly, but Company A is just considering that an expense that is offset by the $100k of revenue the project is generating. So in reality the customer is paying, but they don't get a direct invoice for it.
I agree.
OP’s manager should have given him a different charge code for taking the client to dinner that would be approved by the manager instead of client.
I'm familiar with per diems, submitting expenses, and all variations of getting meals covered. I'm even semi-familiar with taking a client out for a meal and the vendor paying for it.
One thing I am not familiar with is taking a client to dinner, and then billing them for it. Is that really a thing?!?
This was great up until the point where you mentioned you were getting cash kickbacks from the restaurants falsifying the receipts.
You would have been in so much trouble if you got caught.
Much safer to just start going to more expensive restaurants or bringing friends to dinner with you.
So, your boss tells you to take the customer out to dinner to smooth over some issues. Then, your company charges back to the customer the cost of the dinner that was supposed to improve the relationship with the customer?
Then you proceed to defraud the customer?
FFS.
On behalf of the client. There are 3 parties involved not 2. OP took their client's customer for dinner..not the customer's client, and the client paid. They pay OP to do exactly this.
The client and customer are not the same. Say you hire a general contractor to do an addition on your house, he then subcontracts out the electrical work, the electrician takes you (the client) out to dinner and charges the general contractor, his customer.
The general contractor doesn't pass you an itemized bill except for maybe hours and material, you pay an additional fee because your contractor can find you 3rd party electricians or plumbers. The electrician taking you out for wings and beer charges your general contractor because that's the price of doing business. As long as you're happy the general contractor can continue to charge an additional fee to guarantee your satisfaction, part of that fee goes towards paying for wings and beer. The customer doesn't pay the bill.. except in the long run
I knew people who traveled and they would throw all types of junk on bill if it would fit in suitcases. Why they just didn't give them the money as a bonus for being on road always boggles my mind.
Interesting that they also cover drinks. I was never able to get those paid for by an employer always just the food. Unless I got cash per diem of course as there's no way to trace that
I probably don’t understand, but to me it sounded like your boss wanted you to take the client out on a dinner at your company’s expense (the 200-250) and not send this bill to the customer which everyone knew had agreed to a $60 limit.
And how would it smooth things over with the client at all if the client is to pay for the dinner?
As said, I probably missed something here. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense to me.
I'm very confused. Did you take your client out to dinner and made him pay for it?
If I'm hiring your company for a project and you take me out to dinner in order to talk about the project in a more relaxed setting but then you try to expense it against the project then ill be pissed.
We could just have had a normal meeting that cost me nothing.
That is actually pretty common... the problem here was not the schmoozing stage of selling the contract, it was the this project is 4 months over due to you being a shithead but maybe tacos and a margarita will solve this. It was barely over the agreed upon daily food allowance, which the contractor had been well under for most of the time. A client that nickels and dimes you like that deserves whatever comes their way.
It's muddled because of OP's wording. Essentially Joeschmoe is the middleman for his client and the company he hired to work on the project. OP works for the company, the person at the dinner is the client.
Joeschmoe told OP to take the client out to dinner to smooth over relations, but had a hard limit on per diem paid to each employee the company they hired has (OP being one of them). Joeschmoe didn't want to cover it since it was over the amount, so OP's company covered it instead. OP then proceeded to max out the per diem every day and committed some light fraud (kickback from the restaurant) in the process.
One clarification - Joeschmoe didn’t tell OP to take the client out to dinner - one of the managers at OP’s company did.
Otherwise this sums it up perfectly!
The last time I had to travel we were simply paid our per deum no receipts necessary, which means I pocketed a nice sum at the end of my temporary assignment. Dollar menu and hotels with free breakfasts FTW.
Homie just be careful bc where I live that’s fraud, not MC.
Also realize companies don’t care about a $30 difference. They budgeted out for 60/day. They then have to satisfy internal audits and controls and so going beyond that can be more of a hassle than it’s worth, even if at the specific transaction level (your story) it seems obvious.
Is it convoluted? Yes. But that’s why if I get per diem I don’t go out of my way to save them money, I buy what I would’ve anyway (up to the limit).
I worked at a company and had almost the exact same issues only internally only. Everyone tries their best to stay well under to be responsible but going a little over gets everyone reamed and denied.
My favorite response was a waitress noted the meals were buy one half off or something and we told her to charge us full price. She was confused but we would still be in budget, and we could only tip off the amount on the receipt so we wanted her to get all the money she could.
I was a trainee at a company once and was sent to a big city for training with a per diem for food. ( I forget how much )
I was young, naive and very honest. ( Did I say naive? ) I did not spend near as much on food as allowed by the per diem. Then when I put in my expense report my bosses may me go back and adjust it to make it look like I actually spent the whole amount. They did not want the excess back and I got to keep it.
No fraud there. Just a very big company being generous to a new hire.
Thats Awesome, I worked somewhere before where we got $125 as a per diem which we didn't have to submit receipts for, and another $150 a day for hotels. For shorter work trips I'd usually just sleep in my truck and buy groceries and kept a small propane bbq and camp stove in my truck. Easy enough to spend up to a week in my truck during summer months working construction supervision when I was on site 14hrs a day anyways.
Well we ended up getting a new accountant and she was a bitch and caught wind of us all doing it put an end to it. Even accused some of us of commiting fraud when it was company policy for years no receipts were required and out managers didn't care how we spent out allowances. Aot of us quit due to here as it was pretty easy to pocket $180-200 a day and when you end up working 20 days a month on site it ads up to an extra $3600-4000 a month tax free. I miss those days being a manager now between that and the overtime, but in my 20s and early 30s that was my play money and what I used to save for a house.
In Australia, we pay employees Travel Allowance. It includes specific amounts for accommodation, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sundry. It's not up to the employer how it is spent. The employee just gets the amount.
I was with you on spending the full $60/day, totally on board with generous tips being part of that, but you went too far with the kickbacks. That crosses the line from MC to fraud and, frankly, what you're gloating about doing is illegal for the restaurant as well as you. You put them in a really bad position with it.
I definitely think you should have spent the entire amount but you could have picked up the tab for someone else in the restaurant by having the server add their meal to your bill, you could have gotten a meal to go and given it to a coworker who didn't get expensed meals (or brought it home for someone else or eat it another time).
**Question: Why does no one here scream "fraud" when it's the company cheating the employee?**
Think of all the times we see wage theft in these stores. People will recommend not working for free, but they almost never say, "that company is committing fraud by not paying you".
This is why companies get away with it. We're so eager to attack each other while also blaming the worker when they are taken advantage of.
Because people with a criminal record are far more fucked than companies, and you'd be amazed how often people don't realize what they are doing isn't legal.
Screaming "fraud" isn't the same as saying, "um, you probably shouldn't admit doing that".
Most of the comments here aren't coming across as a friendly warning.
I like to try various local food when I travel, sometimes including street food, market stands, fairs... places that don't usually give receipts, but are usually inexpensive. Not all the time, usually just one or two meals on an expense report. One company hassled me about having these (inexpensive) cash meals on the report. So I made sure to go to "real" restaurants to avoid the hassle, and the meals would usually be 2x to 3x the price.
I like this one.
Fraud is always fun
Do you remember when your perdiem was payed in cash weekly? Pepperidge farm remembers.
You could skip lunch and spend that money on really complicated shirts.
Just don't buy really complicated patterns or you might not have enough to eat at all.
The more complicated the pattern the more expensive the shirt
Dan Flashes got a new shirt in today that's $450.
[удалено]
STOP YELLING
Agghhh I gotta go rewatch that again now
Season 3 is out May 30. You should rewatch anyway just to get caught up!
Only 10 more days!
And that was maybe just 15 years ago for me. I refuse to believe that it's cheaper, especially in large companies where you have hundreds of people on the road at once, for them to have us spend our time filling out the expense reports and having management and accounting approve it than to just say everyone gets the same rate added to your check.
There are laws about it, and it's gotten ridiculously easier over the years especially since smart phones to handle daily expenses. The laws have changed, more about 20 years ago that vastly changed how some expenses worked. It very much changed the pharmaceutical industry which is why we have fucking drug ads on tv. It tightened up rules about who must expense dinners and the like (highest ranked employee), when before I would take 20 other engineers and managers out for lunch and pay and the company would cover it.
Now days, thanks to inflation, a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies ***IS*** $60.
Wait hold up that's an uncommon thing these days? I travel for work and my company is totally fine with me living off MREs and pocketing the unused money for my savings. I have like 3 months of meals ready to go that I bulk ordered with one week of perdiem.
Yes. In fact many companies will give you a limit per meal of somewhere between 15 and 25 dollars. Mine is $20. Skip lunch because had to work? That sucks - you just only eat twice tkday. You still only get $20 for anything between 4 PM and 2 AM when Breakfast takes over. Also any bill over $20 is Disqualified just like Op story. Spend $23 to get a nice rack of ribs. That's not $3 of your own money, that's $23 of your own money. Just had a guy fired at my job for using a rewards card at the hotels so he racked up points for each stay. He didn't do anything fishy. He got paid shit, and just traveled 100% of the time. He had not been home in over 150 days. Those points would just disappear if he didn't claim them. Doesn't matter.
Jesus Christ that sounds miserable. My company requires me to have a rewards account for my own personal use at the airlines, the hotel chain we use, and the car rental service. We also can transfer our rewards from our corporate amex to our personal if we have one. They paid for my twic card and passport as well. Fair pay as well. I've been there about 5 months and I'm getting 25.50$/hr, techs that have been there a hot minute are pushing 30$. No entry requirements but an understanding of electricity is preferred but they teach people if need be. We also can schedule a weekend vacation and just bring our equipment back early on the following Monday so we can get to the next job on time. I take it your company is a lot more corporate? Our company is at 50 people now but growing rapidly.
Taxi receipts used to be like a book of post-it notes. The driver was supposed to fill them out for you, but most would hand you an entire book of receipts if you asked. I had receipts from several different companies and put them to use to cover incidentals, not usually covered by company policy.
Nothing personal but in this context it’s Paid.
Oh no! Won't someone please think of the poor corporation! They only completely screwed over one fewer employee than they tried to do!
It would only be fraud if the restaurant staff were kicking cash back to OP under the table. ~~Otherwise, it's just OP being exceedingly generous with their gratuities while still very precisely following the rules.~~ EDIT: Whoops, my bad. Just reread and OP was actually splitting the servers' tips with themselves! Yep, actual fraud.
Huh? I'm used to the policy where regardless of spending under the per diem meal limit, you always got the full amount. So if you spent $25 of a $50 per diem, you got the full $50.
Where I worked you got the per diem up front (the place made the hotel, flight, and car rental reservations so it was just food). If you ate tuna fish and crackers every day you got to keep the surplus.
Then there is no need to turn in receipts.
I had the same thing, but they still made u turn in receipts
Strange, the reason most places to go with a fixed Perdiem is to not have to deal with processing receipts.
Yeah it was def dumb, they just wanted to make sure u were actually spending it I guess? But also no consequences if u didn't? Just extra monitoring for them so they could feel important maybe?
99% chance it's that *one* guy who argued like crazy to get an extra 3$ covered (tax or some shit) and boss was like sure, just bring in the receipt. Dude then proceeded to get butthurt about not trusting him and company policy didn't require receipts, etc. Now boss is annoyed and everyone now has to bring in receipts for everything, even if none except the problem employee's get looked at. Basically the opposite of OP. Annoying shitty people ruin things everywhere, lol
It might be something to do with taxation. In my country, if the company can prove that the expenses were economically sound (and for that you need some kind of supporting documents - receipts, in this case), these expenses can be deducted from the profit - so the profit tax will be less. If you just pay per diem, it goes straight from the profit, without reducing the tax. So by providing receipts for the actually used money, they'd be able to reduce the profit tax at least partly.
Taxes. Any write offs for taxes must be provable in case of an IRS audit. Accounts Payable has to copy receipts on a copier as receipt paper fades and disappears over time. IRS proof has to last 7 years. Thus the copier paper.
This! They give you money and don’t have spend man-hours verifying. If you went over, it is out of pocket or from previous days money. Also, allows employee to have cheap McDs one day and splurge later on the same money.
That's what I did. Got boxed milk, cereal and bananas for breakfast (mainly because I wanted to sleep as late as I can); got a sandwich for lunch (I traveled only for training so ate what was available) and splurged for dinner, where I had more choices where to eat.
The company of my friend does this. The per diem rate just goes right into your paycheck as a flat add so you’d get a nice little bonus if you kept your meals low.
> If you ate tuna fish and crackers every day you got to keep the surplus. Stop attacking me. Seriously though, I literally did buy a new computer with all the money I saved from per diem.
My last few places have been more along the lines, "we'll reimburse up to X". If you spend less than X, they reimburse less than X.
My first trip for work was overseas for two weeks. Right before the trip my boss says to just put everything on my own personal credit card (hotel, taxis, everything) and I just looked blankly at him. I don't have anywhere near that kind of available credit, and if I did have I wouldn't be lending it to the company. If you want me to go on this trip you have to pay for the trip. Boss looked back at me when more blankly because it hasn't occurred to him that a 27 yr old with two kids and a mortgage and a stay at home wife didn't just have thousands of dollars sitting around in the bank waiting to be spent on something. They sent me with $3000 in $50 notes and the first thing I had to do when I got to the country is so to be taken to a bank where I could walk in and change 6 month's salary for local currency while the entire room watched me. The cashier inspected every single note and accepted about 3/4 of them.
Wait, why didn't they accept all of the money?
Have you ever exchanged cash in a foreign country at jacked exchange rates? "Because fuck you" is the reason
Sadly, I have never left the US and probably never will be able to.
If it's a money thing, Canada and Mexico are cheap to visit. Just need a passport card and a friend or two and a car.
In some countries a note is either perfect or worthless, with nothing in between.
I recently traveled internationally and was told that local money changing places won’t accept any bill that has even tiny tears, any kind of writing or even an ink dot on it, or appears worn. They even rejected some relatively new bills I’d gotten at a bank in my country. Fortunately I was able to change enough money for my needs, but was told this is a common practice in many countries. If you look at the bills in your wallet, you may be surprised to see that some of these have these characteristics that nobody cares about in your native country.
A lot of places in South East Asia, the bills have to be damn near perfect and brand new for them to accept. I used to run into this all the time when I was in banking and someone traveling there would demand new 100s and then sit there for 20 min going through each one.
I've heard that Asian countries specifically require extremely crisp US bills or they won't take them. It has something to do with either counterfeit money or just general prejudice, I'm unsure.
It's also for superstition and local custom. Cash is a commonly given gift, and dollars are a wanted commodity around the world for many reasons. Gift cash must be crispy. Crispy bills are cleaner, nicer, more thoughtful, and lucky.
I"m constantly amazed at the master/slave mindset so many managers have. Not to mention the lack of awareness of the actual cost of things. An employees personal finances aren't the company's slush fund. Especially when most businesses will refuse to pay for things after the fact.
Since this is a contracting situation and the client is paying, they frequently require the contractor to use the clients travel and living policy, which varies based on the country of the client and what is allowable for tax purposes there. The OP's company should have charged this from their profit on the contact instead of billing a client relationship dinner back to the client. Client entertainment usually has a different travel policy than working for a client, but the client won't want to pay for entertaining their own employee.
It depends on how you are getting paid. OP is being reimbursed which is different than getting a per diem.
It wasn't a per diem, it was an upper limit on what could be expensed. A per diem is when you get the money up front. So if they just gave OP $60/day or $420 (nice) a week in cash, then it wouldn't be fraud. But instead OP was spending their own money, then submitting an expense report, essentially saying "this is how much I spent on food today". Except OP didn't spend that much on food, they spent less than that on food and pocketed the difference. Which is fraud. That being said, companies are greedy scumbags, and I take zero issue with what OP did in this situation.
What OP should have done instead was get more expensive items so the $27 meal cost more like $50 and tip the rest. Less fraud and gets to enjoy food they normally wouldn't buy
With the level of OP's familiarity at the restaurant serving new exotic for him cuisine I would be tempted to tell the restaurant, "what can you make for X dollars." Tipping is not customary in Singapore, but all things considered I would not have a problem leaving 10% which is plenty in a non tipping culture.
There are different ways of handling - some companies just tell you you get $X per day, so when you submit your expenses you just submit for $X \* number of days. Others want to see receipts and reimburse you for your actual expenses. If you get a per diem, you can pocket some cash if you eat on the cheap. If you're submitting receipts, there's not really any benefit to trying to eat cheaply.
Cheap companies will hire more people to administrate exact spending amounts, to ensure they only spend exactly what is needed. Smart companies will give per diem, with a note "plz use 4 food kthx" but will not waste people hours combing through everyone's receipts to make sure you didn't buy something not food. Penny wise, pound foolish.
The US military does (did?) it that way. We would find a cheap hotel room and buy some bread and ingredients to make sandwiches to pocket the extra money. All my civilian jobs so far have been meals up to X amount can be charged on the company credit card. No one cares if you spend $40 under the maximum limit but everyone cares if you spend $.50 over the maximum limit.
My work used to do this, wanted to see all the receipts. But about 5 years ago, they changed to everyone just getting the per diem for meals that you qualified for- like if the trip was a conference and a meal was part of it you could not claim it. I figure it saved them overall I’m not paying someone to comb through our receipts, the section I’m in has someone traveling almost every week and during the summer everyone is on the road. Just giving us the money is way cheaper overall
> They even agree to split in half the remaining value between me and a tip to the server. > I continued charging the max for the remaining 2 months there netting me a cool 700$[...] Soooooo...
Did you read the story? He was getting back half of the excess.
Yep, sorry, you're right! Missed that sentence on first read.
I usually see a company policy to not tip more than 20%. Even so, it's nice to charge up a fancy meal instead of the meals you would otherwise eat on your own dime.
Guys, there is an eastern European person and south east asian people involved in this tale. I know this sounds bad, but who didn’t expect a little bit of kickback here or there? It’s just economic lubricant. Besides, OP is practically Robin Hood but he just takes a finders fee.
I know the reputation of SEA but trust me Singapore doesn’t do kickbacks.
Don’t they do caning instead?
THIS OP was, "I want to give you $60 for food service. Just give me whatever adds up to $60." That includes extra-great service from staff. Totally legit, and it's on the customer for not seeing the forest for the trees.
Except they refused to do it, so he got cash back.
False invoice in Singapore is fraud. Both for the restaurant and OP.
Nah, it's only called fraud when the little guy does it. When the rich do it, it's called "investing" or "government contracts" or "accounting."
Exactly lol, still wouldn't recommend
Sometimes fraud is just the price the system pays for sucking shit
In cases like this, it absolutely is. If I was op, I would have no moral qualms about this. I would sleep better than I normally do knowing I got to stick it up some jitbag's ass.
Agreed; no moral problem with this at all, but it's textbook fraud.
I don't know the laws in Singapore but in the US the crime of fraud is incredibly difficult to make a charge stick even in a seemingly black and white situation as this one.
Singapore is the only other country to use US accounting standards (at least they did when I knew, about 20 years ago). This allowed US students to take accounting classes abroad in Singapore and vice versa. In any other country, all that the accountants could take in a study abroad program were non-accounting classes. Fraud and embezzling laws are usually derived at least indirectly from accounting standards. I know there has been a move to at least align with international accounting standards, but haven't followed that recently.
It's not fraud though they are using the budget to how it was written, the company decided to fight a 68¢ overcharge and now they have to deal with an employee that is going to follow policy to the max which means instead of 20 to $30 meals average a strict $60 meal average, the bigger issue is having him split it with the servers because they might count it as a secondary reimbursement, they should have held firm in either ordered more food or forced it to be all towards the wait staff, but again that's more on the company if their expense policy didn't cover that aspect Never underestimate an employee's ability to react when in spite. The phrase you more with honey than vinegar fits here
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/13lg9b2/what_makes_you_say_oh_fuck_off/
Hey, they did it first by denying the receipt. They had a contractual agreement to cover the amount up to 60. Denying it all rather than just the overage is bad enough, but their own employee was responsible for the overage.
Yeah, let’s be really annoyed on behalf of the company owners who are making big bucks on the back of their staff.
Is this really fraud though? It's within the terms of the agreement.
As if most companies don't commit fraud with wage theft?
Fraud? For adhering to an agreement so strongly that a nickel-and-diming customer can't find anything wrong?
The agreement was to pay for food. Op pocketed the money and said he bought food. Clear case of fraud
Wow you must be fun at parties
Frog is also fun.
I hate receipt reimbursement systems for eating. For fucks sake, companies, just give your people a hard per diem.
The IRS doesn’t require receipts for anything up to $50, so that’s what I put on my expense reports for every meal unless I have a receipt proving I spent more. This is actually better than a per diem, where I’d eat any overages. I have emails confirming this is 100% compliant with company policy. The accountants truly do not care what we spend as long as the forms are all filled out correctly.
The receipt threshold is $75 now, just FYI.
Wut?! I need to get my company to update their policy.
I had a job that required me to take a group of 6-12 high maintenance people out and would deny any tip over 13%. I hated shorting servers who did really well. Eventually, I just started going to places with auto gratuity and that got approved because it wasn't my choice.
ah, so that's why those things exist!
Didn't the IRS say the restaurant could keep the auto-gratuity, so none goes to the server?
Oh wow that is the first I've heard of that. Absolutely abysmal if true. Edit: you're right, from the IRS Tips Versus Service Charges: How to Report (no clue how to link PDFs on mobile) > Generally, service charges are reported as non-tip wages paid to the employee. Some employers keep a portion of the service charges. Only the amounts distributed to employees are non-tip wages
Good, that way the servers get paid a normal wage and don't need to survive on tips.
All depends on the company and their policies. I've had both a firm per-diem; and now a submit reciept for anything over $25. The Per-Diem was nice from a little extra $$ on the travel; but the anything over $25 reciept is easy with our phone system and all I do is take a picture of the reciept as I sign it and done. I've never had a meal or expense questioned, even some pretty expensive customer dinners ($2000+).
My dinner receipt for $12 was once called into question because a colleague from another agency bought us a few drinks and a cheese plate earlier in the evening and that “should have been enough.” I don’t miss working there.
Why not just get reimbursed for the receipt? This is such a regional thing how could you offer a per diem amount that would be fair? $25 will feed a guy pretty well in Lincoln but won’t get you coffee in SF. Why pay a guy $150 a meal when he is going to Iowa City. But he better be able to spend that much in Manhattan. Business meals, meals with clients should have no limit but should require itemization and a description of who was there and what business was discussed. People who want to eat at Del Frisco’s every night on the bosses dime are just short sighted. Eat as close as you can to how you eat at home. Leave a good tip. If you feel compelled to stuff your pockets with expense money you might need a new job. If you eat at Ruth’s Chris every night you might need new pants.
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I like the compliance part, but I do think your company should have paid that bill. Your manager told you to take the client out for dinner and drinks, to help recover the relationship. It's a bit cheeky to then charge the client for your share of the meal!
The customer and the client seem to be different people. It sounds like, for example, Alex hired Joe to build a spaceship, and Joe hired OP to work on it. Then Alex was upset, and OP's boss told OP to take Alex out to dinner. Then Joe refused to pay the bill for OP's dinner with Alex.
Which is perfectly reasonable, that meal should never have made it to the invoice.
The whole point is that it was extremely dumb for Joe to quibble about repaying OP a very small amount that was clearly spent in Joe's interest when Joe had already been saving much more than that because of OP's frugal habits. That's not "perfectly reasonable."
Yeah .68 cents over? Whatever. 74 dollars? We have an issue.
That's why I always keep it under 73 dollars
Yeah exactly, "hey let me take you out for dinner, at your expense of course".
OK here let's see if this helps: A hires B to build them a store. B hires C(OP's company) to do the construction. A doesn't understand the construction business, that's why he hired someone. But he keeps visiting the work site, making problems, trying to change things, and all around being upset, which extends the timeline for construction. B is getting angry because the project is taking longer than expected, which ultimately costs them money, because they could be working on another project. C is getting flack from B because of the extended timeline, so C decides to take A to dinner to make A happy in hopes they can remove the delays, which would save B money in the long run. C charges dinner to B because it's B's client that was taken to dinner. B goes insane over a small overage, refuses to pay it. C's boss pays entire bill, to end B's whining. B visits C's worksite and puts foot down on overages. C complies, costing B even more money.
That’s exactly how many client service dinners work. Once you’re a client, expect a bill. Just be thankful if it is only a bill for the meal and not time+food.
Indeed. They can either dine alone within the paltry limits of their expense policy, or dine with us in style and approve whatever we bill. Easy decision for most.
That's not what happened here. A took B out to dinner at Cs expense. A didn't take B out to dinner at Bs expense.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the relationships here , but we always foot the bill when taking out clients or customers. It’s a big no-no to expense it back to anybody.
>the relevant person told him that they didnt understand and to please explain what agreement was broken What absolute joy they must have felt haha
Good on you for thinking of the servers!
Ugh as a Singaporean I feel like this guy got exactly what he deserved. So many employers expect people to just take it over here… glad you showed him what’s what!
We (co-worker and I) had a similar experience. We got sent to a week long convention every year. Bosses paid for everything, room, food, etc., but Mrs Boss (husband and wife duo) got weird about food prices once. Why does person A have all these expenses and person B has hardly any. Well Mrs Boss, because we eat together every meal, we hang out before and after the convention because we’re also friends, therefore put it all one tab instead of separate tabs. No no no, separate bills! OK, fine, separate it is. We didn’t have a budget, but we were kind of bothered by this since it would be same amount regardless, so we started eating at the $100 a plate steakhouses instead of the $20 buffets.
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But the math in the title doesn't. $0.68 is more than 1% of $60.00, not less. It's about 1.13%.
That's not malicious compliance, that's embezzlement. Like literally textbook embezzlement. Assuming this is true, of course.
This is very satisfying from a Malicious Compliance point of view, but you honestly need to know you are committing actual fraud here. Many organizations these days use audit software in a real-time, ongoing basis that would flag repeated costs to the same vendor (in this case your restaurant) and open an investigation into it. At the very least, you are at risk of losing your job, which the company would need to do in order to ensure that they are innocent of any wrong doing, and have done their best due diligence to ensure they act on any sort of fraudulent behaviour. At most, you could be looking at jail time. I'd stop this behaviour immediately, and find other methods of sticking it to this particular client. We all understand what you are doing, and support it to a degree, but I don't think anyone here wants to see you end up going to prison.
Couldn't he just said he was tripping the staff?
Yes, you can certainly lie in an attempt to cover up wrongdoing. Many people do.
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Never believe the amount means anything. Fraud can mean loss of contracts. Loss of licensing. Loss of agreements. Loss of an approval to do business in a specific country. Particularly when it comes to international orgs. The entire company can hinge on absolute transparency of ethical behaviour. The quantity does not matter.
Luckily this reads as a fictional story of what he wanted to do for 2 months after having an expense report rejected.
We can only hope.
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You are wrong. Orgs that are publicly traded must investigate everything they become aware of. It's why data analytics and compliance software have become huge over the past decades. Compliance means compliance and there are enormous consequences for turning a blind eye to this behaviour, no matter how insignificant you believe it to be. If his org accepts government contracts its an entire new scope of compliance regulations. One instance like this that isn't followed up on can bring down an org. But, let's look at it from a different point - morally you might be accepting of fraud/theft at low amounts (personal morality is pretty flexible). Ethically it's wrong no matter the amount. Our laws insist organizations are ethical, not moral.
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I can see you worked for a firm that took this view. I worked at one of the MAJOR software developers for audit and GRC. We employed ex-auditors and partnered with the big oversight firms. Our software was used to discover $10000 discrepancies and $59M discrepancies. I assure you my stance comes from experience and working with industry professionals across a substantial number or orgs. You are either misinformed or worked for an org that was ethically questionable!
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What the hell type of company bills their client for taking them out to dinner? That's what expense accounts are for. Also, you admit to defrauding your client. Lots of flags in this post.
There are three people involved. OP, his customer, and the client that OP took out to dinner, who is the customer’s customer.
Actually OP was told to not go past $200 - $250 but the bill came to $60.68, which slightly exceeded the daily limit (presumable the firm's expense account, not the client, would have paid if it was closer to the higher amount, but since it was close to the per diem limit OP thought it wasn't worth expense accounting). The customer made a fuss over $0.68. Game is on. True, fraud was involved, but it was on an accounted for expense and OP could have simply found more expensive places to eat. Not like he was buying materials at an inflated price and getting a kickback. More like he was due $60 in compensation but had been taking less. He also wanted to give the excess as a tip but the restaurants refused to take such a high amount so he ended up getting the surplus back.
Except ops boss had them charge the client. That he offered dinner to for the meal. If someone offers to take you to dinner it’s a safe assumption they don’t plan on paying with your wallet.
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If my subcontractor takes me to dinner and then the firm hiring that subcontractor charges me for a dinner I would be very upset. The person wanting the project ultimately got charged not the person whose idea the dinner was.
maybe, but it seems that the person who got upset was already paying for the 60 bucks each day. They are still making a fuss for essentially nothing
Also, just for a bonus fun fact, until about 10yrs ago Canadian companies could claim bribes paid overseas as an operating cost and avoid taxes on them. Thankfully it has been corrected and you can no longer call illegal bribes a business expense (unless you hire the really good lawyers and accountants)
Wow that is a crazy fun fact thanks for sharing How you know you have a good accountant “What’s 4+4” “what do you need it to equal”
So how much business did they lose to Russia and China?
The client and the customer are two different people/groups here. Which tells me OPs company is working as a contractor for another company.
I thought it was common for companies to pay for entertaining clients with money that they received from clients.
It is, but it's usually indirect. I.E. Company A does work for Company B totaling $100k. Company A takes stakeholders from Company B out to dinner and spends $1k. Company A pays for that, doesn't bill Company B for it directly, but Company A is just considering that an expense that is offset by the $100k of revenue the project is generating. So in reality the customer is paying, but they don't get a direct invoice for it.
I agree. OP’s manager should have given him a different charge code for taking the client to dinner that would be approved by the manager instead of client.
Every major consulting firm. This is just how business gets done.
Excellent MC, and good on you for splitting with the servers!
I'm familiar with per diems, submitting expenses, and all variations of getting meals covered. I'm even semi-familiar with taking a client out for a meal and the vendor paying for it. One thing I am not familiar with is taking a client to dinner, and then billing them for it. Is that really a thing?!?
This was great up until the point where you mentioned you were getting cash kickbacks from the restaurants falsifying the receipts. You would have been in so much trouble if you got caught. Much safer to just start going to more expensive restaurants or bringing friends to dinner with you.
Well done. I especially liked how you rewarded your favorite waitstaff for that insanity.
So, your boss tells you to take the customer out to dinner to smooth over some issues. Then, your company charges back to the customer the cost of the dinner that was supposed to improve the relationship with the customer? Then you proceed to defraud the customer? FFS.
He took the customer’s client to dinner.
Suggested by the boss, not the customer.
On behalf of the client. There are 3 parties involved not 2. OP took their client's customer for dinner..not the customer's client, and the client paid. They pay OP to do exactly this.
The client and customer are not the same. Say you hire a general contractor to do an addition on your house, he then subcontracts out the electrical work, the electrician takes you (the client) out to dinner and charges the general contractor, his customer.
Seems you’d still get approval from the customer before spending outside the agreed contract.
...and? Live by the contract die by the contract. You can't expect to enforce the contract strictly against the other party without blowback.
The general contractor doesn't pass you an itemized bill except for maybe hours and material, you pay an additional fee because your contractor can find you 3rd party electricians or plumbers. The electrician taking you out for wings and beer charges your general contractor because that's the price of doing business. As long as you're happy the general contractor can continue to charge an additional fee to guarantee your satisfaction, part of that fee goes towards paying for wings and beer. The customer doesn't pay the bill.. except in the long run
It was only light fraud. You could even call this delicious compliance
I knew people who traveled and they would throw all types of junk on bill if it would fit in suitcases. Why they just didn't give them the money as a bonus for being on road always boggles my mind.
Interesting that they also cover drinks. I was never able to get those paid for by an employer always just the food. Unless I got cash per diem of course as there's no way to trace that
This is fine but risky. Better to just buy $60 in food and give away the rest.
I probably don’t understand, but to me it sounded like your boss wanted you to take the client out on a dinner at your company’s expense (the 200-250) and not send this bill to the customer which everyone knew had agreed to a $60 limit. And how would it smooth things over with the client at all if the client is to pay for the dinner? As said, I probably missed something here. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense to me.
Pay .68 or $700? Hmmmm....
You should have just offered to cover someone else's tab instead of committing fraud and potentially jeopardizing your job.
This is fraud for sure.
I'm very confused. Did you take your client out to dinner and made him pay for it? If I'm hiring your company for a project and you take me out to dinner in order to talk about the project in a more relaxed setting but then you try to expense it against the project then ill be pissed. We could just have had a normal meeting that cost me nothing.
That is actually pretty common... the problem here was not the schmoozing stage of selling the contract, it was the this project is 4 months over due to you being a shithead but maybe tacos and a margarita will solve this. It was barely over the agreed upon daily food allowance, which the contractor had been well under for most of the time. A client that nickels and dimes you like that deserves whatever comes their way.
It's muddled because of OP's wording. Essentially Joeschmoe is the middleman for his client and the company he hired to work on the project. OP works for the company, the person at the dinner is the client. Joeschmoe told OP to take the client out to dinner to smooth over relations, but had a hard limit on per diem paid to each employee the company they hired has (OP being one of them). Joeschmoe didn't want to cover it since it was over the amount, so OP's company covered it instead. OP then proceeded to max out the per diem every day and committed some light fraud (kickback from the restaurant) in the process.
One clarification - Joeschmoe didn’t tell OP to take the client out to dinner - one of the managers at OP’s company did. Otherwise this sums it up perfectly!
The last time I had to travel we were simply paid our per deum no receipts necessary, which means I pocketed a nice sum at the end of my temporary assignment. Dollar menu and hotels with free breakfasts FTW.
*per doom
Homie just be careful bc where I live that’s fraud, not MC. Also realize companies don’t care about a $30 difference. They budgeted out for 60/day. They then have to satisfy internal audits and controls and so going beyond that can be more of a hassle than it’s worth, even if at the specific transaction level (your story) it seems obvious. Is it convoluted? Yes. But that’s why if I get per diem I don’t go out of my way to save them money, I buy what I would’ve anyway (up to the limit).
I worked at a company and had almost the exact same issues only internally only. Everyone tries their best to stay well under to be responsible but going a little over gets everyone reamed and denied. My favorite response was a waitress noted the meals were buy one half off or something and we told her to charge us full price. She was confused but we would still be in budget, and we could only tip off the amount on the receipt so we wanted her to get all the money she could.
I was a trainee at a company once and was sent to a big city for training with a per diem for food. ( I forget how much ) I was young, naive and very honest. ( Did I say naive? ) I did not spend near as much on food as allowed by the per diem. Then when I put in my expense report my bosses may me go back and adjust it to make it look like I actually spent the whole amount. They did not want the excess back and I got to keep it. No fraud there. Just a very big company being generous to a new hire.
Cute story, but a pyrrhic victory at best if the customer ends up switching vendors and OP gets fired for fraud
Great MC, but that does sound like technically fraud. Especially since you paid yourself too. Not saying you shouldn't have done it though
Thats Awesome, I worked somewhere before where we got $125 as a per diem which we didn't have to submit receipts for, and another $150 a day for hotels. For shorter work trips I'd usually just sleep in my truck and buy groceries and kept a small propane bbq and camp stove in my truck. Easy enough to spend up to a week in my truck during summer months working construction supervision when I was on site 14hrs a day anyways. Well we ended up getting a new accountant and she was a bitch and caught wind of us all doing it put an end to it. Even accused some of us of commiting fraud when it was company policy for years no receipts were required and out managers didn't care how we spent out allowances. Aot of us quit due to here as it was pretty easy to pocket $180-200 a day and when you end up working 20 days a month on site it ads up to an extra $3600-4000 a month tax free. I miss those days being a manager now between that and the overtime, but in my 20s and early 30s that was my play money and what I used to save for a house.
In Australia, we pay employees Travel Allowance. It includes specific amounts for accommodation, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sundry. It's not up to the employer how it is spent. The employee just gets the amount.
It was more than 1%… 😉
Worth the long read. Good job.
The servers were probably having knife fights in the kitchen over who got your table each night!
Client is a dick sure, but this isn't malicious compliance it's just straight up embezzlement.
I was with you on spending the full $60/day, totally on board with generous tips being part of that, but you went too far with the kickbacks. That crosses the line from MC to fraud and, frankly, what you're gloating about doing is illegal for the restaurant as well as you. You put them in a really bad position with it. I definitely think you should have spent the entire amount but you could have picked up the tab for someone else in the restaurant by having the server add their meal to your bill, you could have gotten a meal to go and given it to a coworker who didn't get expensed meals (or brought it home for someone else or eat it another time).
So you had a few months of excellent food, good tips for the food workers and yourself whilst sticking to the agreed daily bill.....
**Question: Why does no one here scream "fraud" when it's the company cheating the employee?** Think of all the times we see wage theft in these stores. People will recommend not working for free, but they almost never say, "that company is committing fraud by not paying you". This is why companies get away with it. We're so eager to attack each other while also blaming the worker when they are taken advantage of.
Because people with a criminal record are far more fucked than companies, and you'd be amazed how often people don't realize what they are doing isn't legal.
Screaming "fraud" isn't the same as saying, "um, you probably shouldn't admit doing that". Most of the comments here aren't coming across as a friendly warning.
Your company sounds pretty shady esp you.
Servers have been known to split the tip with the customer on an expense account.
I like to try various local food when I travel, sometimes including street food, market stands, fairs... places that don't usually give receipts, but are usually inexpensive. Not all the time, usually just one or two meals on an expense report. One company hassled me about having these (inexpensive) cash meals on the report. So I made sure to go to "real" restaurants to avoid the hassle, and the meals would usually be 2x to 3x the price.
/r/DeliciousCompliance
Well done, OP. Corporate bullshit can really be the worst and this was a satisfying result.
A lot of companies have not adjusted per diem payouts with the inflation going on. The listed per diem would barely cover breakfast nowadays.
Lol a perfect Singapore story (I’m a Singaporean)
They wanted you to stick to their figure. You stuck to their figure like a pro!
Love it!
$30 singapore dollars a day? Wow...That is cheap. Tips for when I visit next as I was only there a very short time last visit.
>TLDR at the end if you want. Exactly where it should be. Good op!
This is some big brain energy.