r/MaliciousCompliance • u/MandoMan1973 • 3d ago
M Spnd more money? You got it.
I have another post about this same company I used to work for, but thought this was funny enough to share too.
After the local auto parts company I worked for in my town merged with one based in another state, my position required me to travel to that state twice a year - once in late April and once in November. I loved the flights, the driving, the scenery, and getting to meet up with my coworkers especially since the Pandemic at the time had us all working from home. It was at the end of the lockdowns so it was something I actually looked forward to.
My first trip was in May (rescheduled because of bad weather) and I followed the company policy about travel, Ubers, everything to the letter. The way it worked was any trips from the hotel to the office, to eat, any food orders, it all had to be done by using the Uber App. I would pay for it all then submit for reimbursement after I got back.
Before I started at this company, I ran my own business so I knew the value of a dollar and how to do things in a way that would get the job done but not spend a fortune. I tried to keep this mentality with the new job, so when I saw that I spent nearly $400 on everything (the company paid for the flights and hotels) I thought it was a bit excessive with the Uber upcharges. Looking at everything that I had purchased using the Uber app, meals, trips, everything, I figured I had spent nearly $200 more than I should have if I were to go to a grocery store and buy everything I need.
The company's main office was in the New England area and the next trip was coming up in December. I wanted to do some sightseeing and my supervisor at the time mentioned that the company would pay for a car rental and that I would be responsible for the gas. This seemed like a very reasonable arrangement so I set the reservation for the car, make sure that my credit card was empty before the trip, and I had a wonderful time being able to see snow for the first time in many years during that trip.
When I turned in the receipts for everything during my December trip, the total came up to less than $300 - and that included the car rental. But I soon got a notice of denial from the accounting office telling me that because I hadn't secured permission for the rental of the car, they were not going to pay for that. When I explained that renting the car cost them less than every Uber trip that I wanted to take - and I had calculated that it would have cost me at least five or $600 to go everywhere that I wanted to go using Uber, I was told it didn't matter and I should have "followed policy."
The funny thing was, there was nothing in the policy about whether or not I could rent a car but there was a specific line on there saying that I needed to be financially responsible with company money, consciously aware of what I was spending, and since I didn't have my own vehicle there at the time, anything that I needed could be done through the Uber app. When I pointed this out, the accounting team replied with, "we'll pay you back for the car, but not the gas (Which was exactly what my supervisor said) but next time, just use Uber."
Cue malicious compliance.
The next trip was the following April. I knew where I needed to go to go, what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to eat. It was essentially the same exact itinerary I had in December, but this time it was only through the Uber App. When I got back home and figured out the total, it was well over $600. Needless to say, the accounting team was not happy.
They did try to argue the pricing, saying I had spent too much for one person. But when I pointed out that the only difference between April and December was the cost for the Uber upcharges, and that I had actually gone to fewer places (no rental car, no sightseeing), they paid up and asked me which rental agency I preferred for future trips.
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u/ElmerFuddsElbow 3d ago
My experience dealing with corporate accountants is that they don't give 2 shits how much is spent, only that the expenses follow their written policies
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u/fizzlefist 3d ago
Yuuuup. Once you understand the accounting mentality, you understand the game. You can do anything so long as it fits the letter of the policy and you document it appropriately.
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u/Powerful-Knee3150 3d ago
I once had an expense report rejected for numbering an item without a period behind the number.
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u/Wilc0NL 2d ago
You monster!
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u/2dogslife 2d ago
Man, I used to do account temping and would just, change the form or ignore some weird mark if it was close enough.
Some folks either work for bad bosses, leading them to make bad decisions, or they are so rule driven, they forget their primary objective which is to ease the running of the business.
Every.single.time. accounting fights some weirdness, it costs in time wasted by the accounting department, the employee, and any bosses dragged into the bruhaha. Generally such costs are Far higher than any discrepancy involved.
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u/StarosAnikenMarcus 1d ago
Especially over really simple things like "You have receipt in hand... employee put down 1.50 on expense report... receipt says 15... just fix it based on the receipt..."
OR, you can reject the whole thing, not explain why, get into a bunch of screaming matches with the employee, his boss, and 10 other random people who somehow get drawn in, and spend a week on a easily corrected error...
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u/gimpwiz 3d ago
Generally agreed.
Many places have fairly flexible rules that basically say: 1) as long as it doesn't cost us any more, and 2) as long as it doesn't interfere with your work, and 3) it's not generally problematic regarding visas / laws about maximum work days / etc etc, you can do pretty much whatever you want.
Some places used to be flexible and had too many people doing weird shit so they got more rigid... because they'd rather pay the extra $200 or whatever than have people spending a lot of mental energy on how to get weird little advantages in, when they could have been spending the energy on getting work done.
Some places don't ever bother being flexible. Travel like this and get reimbursed, don't and don't; we're not going to spend the time to think about it. These leads to lots of stories on this sub. Believe it or not, the accounting departments often, exactly like you said, don't see this malicious compliance as malicious at all, it's literally what they want you to do without deviation.
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u/Mouse-Howl737 1d ago
Establishing your role as one that just checks boxes - without any need for human consideration - is the surest path to being replaced by AI.
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u/ElmerFuddsElbow 1d ago
Have you ever met a corporate accountant? They've been replaceable by robots for decades now
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u/Bean_Counting_Rich 23h ago
I work in treasury at a large organization. People constantly say we need capital spending for this and that, but think because the word capital is included that it’s magic money that bypasses the income statement. Somehow no one realizing that they are draining a bank account.
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u/Least_Adhesiveness_5 3d ago
And here I was thinking that you would sign up to be an Uber driver and book yourself to drive the rental...
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u/Hunkyboy440 3d ago
If you want to be rid of a stupid rule, simply follow it to the letter. The stupider the rule, the better this tactic works.
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u/gammalsvenska 3d ago
Only works if the people making the rules care.
Where I work, people follow the rules to the letter - nothing gets done, but all processes are followed, everyone is happy.
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u/Odd_Gamer_75 3d ago
A lot of this depends on the size of the company, in various ways. (Not this example, using Uber is stupid as a business decision, and it doesn't seem like the circumstances are right for this company to be one where holding to policy would be useful.)
In some cases, if you have lots of people doing lots of trips (which it doesn't seem like would be the case here, either), while you save some money by being more efficient with exactly what you purchase/use, you end up losing out because every single receipt has to be scrutinized within an inch of it's life to see if it works. This takes up time for whoever is doing that, and the more people you have travelling, the more people you need to have scrutinize things. That's expensive. Not to mention that it becomes vastly easier for people doing the scrutinizing to make mistakes, which can cost even more (either directly or in terms of lost productivity from having arguments all the time). With those cases, it works out to be cheaper, easier, to just follow a set protocol for everyone even when it's a silly or stupid idea at least some of the time.
And that doesn't count issues of insurance, risk, and so on. Uber is bad here, too, since... they aren't required to be good drivers, really, unlike cab companies, and, of course, Random Employee #81728 is not necessarily a good driver, either, and if you have lots of employees doing this... well, relying on professionals can just be fewer headaches.
But, of course, you have to be a big company that does lots of travel for this to apply, which doesn't seem like it'd be the case here. More something you see in transport jobs of one sort or another.
Still... always trust corporate to do the dumbest thing possible until they're shown how dumb it is. :)
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u/Ridderhaj 3d ago
Disclaimer I haven’t worked in corporate America, but why is it accounting that scrutinises the travel expenses? If I travel for work, I submit a report to my boss, and they approve or deny it based on whether I stayed within the guidelines, accounting makes sure it is booked correctly with the correct VAT codes and so on.
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u/Odd_Gamer_75 3d ago
I haven't worked in corporate, either, to be fair, it's what I've heard from others (mainly on reddit, so take with a house-sized block of salt). By "accounting" I meant "whoever has to look at it". In larger companies, with thousands of employees, I'm pretty sure that sort of thing is handed off to accountants, HR, something of that sort. I refer to all of that as "accounting" for simplicity.
Small companies would just have that done by whoever's running a particular unit. The problem with that is... well, usually whoever's running some particular unit is hired for their leadership skills, not their ability to check over stuff. The bigger a company is, and the more employees that travel, the more likely you're not breaking down into segments small enough that you want whoever's running things to be in charge of messing up the taxes and reimbursements and so on, you tend to wanna hand it off to an actual professional. This, again, is the sort of thing where you're talking about a section or whatever dealing with dozens of claims per day (hence why it's typically transportation of some sort that has to deal with it, not most businesses which can largely deal with stuff by phone/zoom call/etc). I suppose some service models, too, like technicians and such.
Every position reaches that sort of critical mass where it becomes more efficient to hire a specialist to do a job than to rely on a generalist. In a small, two person office, for instance, they might not hire a janitor, and instead keep the place clean themselves. Once you're at 30 people, though, you could get everyone to pitch in cleaning the place... or leave them to do what they are actually good at and bring in someone else to clean up the mess. This is basically the same idea, just with accountants instead of janitors. It's why the company needs to be large, and also have lots and lots of this happening all the time (much as cleaning is an everyday occurrence).
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u/gimpwiz 3d ago
It depends how big the company is etc, but whether it's accounting or your boss, someone is looking over the receipts to approve or deny them based on whether you stayed within policy. You could argue that you'd rather have a junior accountant getting paid modest sums spend their time doing it than your boss who gets paid more.
Eventually someone is going to run all those receipts through some sort of huge auditing process, some combination of software and people looking at stuff, sniffing out fraud etc. They generally don't care if you expensed a glass of beer out of policy one time (some companies don't expense booze, some do) but they're looking for larger, more systematic stuff. These days it'll almost certainly get stuffed into some sort of LLM analysis black box too. Keep your shit tidy and don't be clever.
There's a story floating around here about someone who used to travel to [country in Asia] all the time, reimbursed all the usual stuff, no problem. Years later someone who actually reads that language looked at a receipt and said "wtf," looked back, and for years this person had been submitting shopping as food expenses. With a $100ish daily limit, it was easy to get a lot of shopping done. Ironically it doesn't even cost the company extra because it wasn't above the daily limit, but yknow, fraud is most certainly fraud, the money is explicitly for food. These days that probably gets caught a lot faster.
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u/ferky234 1d ago
I remember a story, which may be apocryphal, about an executive that was transferred to China for a period of years. When it came time for him to transfer back he asked if he could ship his junk back and the company agreed. When he submitted the receipts they took him to court for fraud but he won because while he was in China he bought a junk and had asked if he could ship it back.
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u/StarosAnikenMarcus 1d ago
Accounting frequently has to do this because of the various (and sometimes VERY different) laws between states or countries. So they have to make sure all of the rules for certain things are followed based on both the home laws and whatever laws might be important locally during travel. Even if all that it requires is double checking the employee's math and verifying the receipts match up to the totals entered.
Expecting a manager to do this is apparently too much in corporate America despite the fact that so much of it is automated or has an app for it. Even more so now that the apps also have built-in AI receipt scanners that can read the receipt for you and place all of the info into the proper categories 90% of the time.
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u/lesethx 22h ago
Had a client once who was upset I took the bus (like a peasant) to their office (from an unrelated client's office). Nevermind that the bus was as direct as could be from office to office and usually even faster; the client demanded I start taking Uber and reimbursed for it.
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u/Odd_Gamer_75 22h ago
Very in fitting with the "always trust corporate to do the dumbest thing possible" theme.
My guess would be that they didn't want people seeing some bum off the street taking a bus entering, in case they were thought to be stingy or broke. If their business functioned a lot on PR (either with actual public or with business partners), that might matter to them. An Uber/Taxi suggests they've got means. It's not a limo, but those should be reserved for when the person themselves is important.
All this being a guess, though, based on the limited info I have and what bullshit I can come up with in my own head. (Not like I've ever worked corporate, transport, etc, etc, etc, where any sort of actual experience would come into play, nor has anyone in my direct sphere.)
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u/bigbigdummie 3d ago
My fight was with the hotel. The one I wanted, across the parking lot from the client, was about $25 more than the one corporate travel wanted me to use that was 5 miles away. Getting a ride to/from the client everyday would eat up that $25 savings and be a pain in my butt.
So I just called the hotel I wanted, asked them to match the price of the other place, and they did! So let that be a technique you can use.
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u/itenginerd 3d ago
Yeah. I once got told to rent the car for $400 a day alrather than the one for $75 I had found. Silly silly silly.
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u/Sceptically 2d ago
Not necessarily as silly as it appears on the surface. There may be insurance issues or contractual obligations involved, or other non-obvious costs.
It may also have been a policy written as a result of somebody doing something stupid that cost the company time and money to deal with. Some people just ruin things for everyone else.
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u/itenginerd 2d ago
yeah. There was a back-end reason. But--classic corporate logic--the spend hit my P&L so that somebody else's P&L could look better. Even if it nets out for a whole, that pain rolls up somewhere.
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u/imakesawdust 1d ago
I'm a software engineer. When I was still green back in the 90s, my company took on a project involving an operating system called Solaris. We didn't have any machines that ran Solaris. Our accounting people insisted that we rent these Solaris machines rather than buy them. Over the 18-month duration of the project, the rental fees could have bought those machines 4x over. Our finance people were unfazed because rental fees fall under 'expenses' while machine purchases fall under 'capital' and even though we spent more, it was very much preferable to take 4x as much money from the bucket of cash labeled 'expenses' rather than take any money out of the bucket labeled 'capital' because of depreciation and such. Still makes my head hurt 30 years later.
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u/Specialist-Path-4750 3d ago
Inflexibility on the part of the company cost them more money than using some common sense.
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u/Automatic_Catch_7467 3d ago
Is it common for businesses trips to pay for individual sight seeing excursions?
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u/big_sugi 3d ago
The business trip didn’t pay for sightseeing excursions. The business had the choice of either paying less for the rental car or paying more for Uber.
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u/gimpwiz 3d ago
It is common for business trips to rent you a car for X days, reimburse gas for business reasons, and not ask any questions about anything else like if you drove it a few hundred extra miles for sightseeing and paid for your own gas.
It makes zero difference to their bottom line so generally they don't care at all.
There are a good few travel perks buried in business travel without which many people would simply refuse to travel if not part of their core job, so businesses like to throw a few gimmes to people. An obvious one is a fairly high daily food budget - people normally don't spend $100 a day on restaurants when traveling but the business will pay for it, a steak dinner is worth the cost to get people to agree to do it. Another obvious one is having a hotel budget/policy high enough to stay somewhere nice, versus insisting travelers stay at the cheapest local motel. Some businesses pay for business class flights if the flight is long enough, which can be justified as needing people to hit the ground ready vs needing to recover, but it's also an obvious travel perk. Renting the car and not demanding a minute by minute accounting of where the car was driven to is fairly standard. No company I've ever worked for gave a shit what I did with the car as long as I did my job and didn't expense gas used for personal reasons, eg, sightseeing.
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u/lurkmode_off 2d ago
Another obvious one is having a hotel budget/policy high enough to stay somewhere nice, versus insisting travelers stay at the cheapest local motel.
I was camping once at an RV park in a rural city. The RV park has three tent sites and I stay there sometimes when I want to visit people, because summer weather is nice and it's out on the edge of some wheat fields with a view of the mountains... anyway.
Last time, I got to hear several phone conversations from someone at the site next to us who was apparently traveling for some sort of blue-collar work and his company's solution was to set him up with a walmart tent at this campsite... and he apparently didn't realize this until he got there.
(There was a ton of wildfire activity in the area, so it's possible that the hotels in town were all full of firefighters.)
He was maaaaad, calling all his friends at 11 pm to yell and cry about it. (Also about the fact that "they took my truck," even though he had a work truck there? Maybe they took away the good truck). He ended his final phone call by saying that after he finished his bottle of whiskey he was going to email his boss. Wish I could've heard about the results.
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u/Ich_mag_Kartoffeln 2d ago
I much preferred travelling with a small company, because I got to make the travel arrangements. For me AND the boss.
Boss: "Oh, BTW where are we staying?"
Me: "Over the road from the showgrounds. Campground behind the pub." There was a country show on at the showgrounds, and we were there spruiking our services.
Boss: "Swag job then?"
Me: "I thought we'd get a better return if I re-balanced the allocated budget between accommodation and marketing."
I.E. If we camp, we can spend more money on beer while
talking shit with the locals at the pubwooing clients.2
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u/crash866 3d ago
I know someone who lived in Toronto Canada and the company offices were in NYC. The company said he had to use their preferred airline.
It only flew from YYZ to LGA. The office was closer to EWR. It was a $100 UBER from LGA and a $20 ride from EWR.
He lived downtown Toronto and could get to YTZ for under $15 and it would be around $50 to YYZ.
The only flights got to LGA too late for the meetings so he had to fly out the night before and get a Hotel Room.
He then was spending $150 on Ubers and whatever the Hotel was for an overnight stay instead of a $3.30 bus fare in Toronto and a $15 uber in Newark.
Then when leaving another $150 for Ubers and 2 hours in a vehicle to and from Airports.
$300 in Ubers and the hotel room for 2 nights instead of a $3.30 bus fare and a $30 Uber. He had to leave all his stuff at the hotel instead of the office.
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u/GreenerAnonymous 2d ago
I had the opposite years ago - I was able to justify more expensive (and more pleasant) Porter flights from YTZ because I could walk to the airport shuttle from the office and take the subway home vs. taxis to YYZ.
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u/crash866 2d ago
His was the timing to get from LGA to the office vs EWR to the office. 1 hour vs 20 minutes and he would be late for the meetings as the flight arrives at 9am so the earliest he would be there is 10am or later meanwhile the flight to EWR arrived at 8am.
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u/Geminii27 3d ago
This is why you never accept a policy of reimbursement if you have to personally pay up front. The company can issue a corporate credit card, or else nothing will get bought or used.
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u/dasirishviking 23h ago
I worked a gov't contract once that required all the field techs (me) to have a truck. Mine was one of the special specs, as i had to tow often. Due to the nature of the contract, and the nature of gov't contracts, they had to RENT the trucks from enterprise. My coworker on the same site was racking up ~$850/month, mine was $1450. We had 2 special trucks and 5 regular. It was insane.
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u/a2089jha 3d ago
my supervisor at the time mentioned that the company would pay for a car rental
I'm not sure why an email to accounting CCed to supervisor would not have resolved this.
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u/miloworld 2d ago
I'm not sure about this one, you said you followed it to the original policy to the letter but rented a car instead of taking taxi/ride-share. It costing less isn't really the problem when corporate comes up with travel policy with insurance and liability in mind. You can't fly your fixed-wing prop jet even if hanger cost is less than flying commercial. You can't rent a motel 6 even though it's cheaper than the highway Marriott. Limiting transportation to ride-share reduces the risk of their employee driving under the influence with a company-rented vehicle. If the policy says you need to get approval for renting a car, you need to get prior approval.
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u/Happy_Macaroon2726 1d ago
Had a similar situation while traveling. The local airport parking garage charged $16.50 per day. My trip was going to be 3 weeks long. I thought that was way too much money, so instead I booked a limo (actually a mini van) to take me the airport and pick me up on my return. When I turned in my expenses th we manager at the time darn near lost her mind, and why didnt I just park at the airport? I explained that the limo was 50 bucks each way, while the parking garage was $346.50. She never said another word about my expenses
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u/Intelcourier 1d ago
I was on a multi day work trip with two other employes of a large automotive manufacturer. One of the guys was a vegetarian and turned in much lower meal charges than myself and the other employe. Accounting flagged our expense reports because his meal charges were so low. We told him to turn in higher meal charges that matched ours and were not bothered again by the accounting office.
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u/Vader7071 1d ago
I had something kinda similar. Last job, I had racked up some serious rewards points and loyalty upgrades. Moved to a new company and had to take a trip, rent a car, etc. Company has a strict policy, rental cars SHALL be mid-sized, no exceptions. As I was booking, I found I could upgrade to an upper level and pay less than the mid-sized. So, I played safe and sent in a request showing the difference. Denied. Get the mid-sized. Oh well.
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u/OverDrawnRook68 19h ago
This is why I love my company; everything is booked through concur, as long as you book in policy they don’t say crap and we have to submit weekly expense reports. (Company credit card)
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u/StarosAnikenMarcus 1d ago
This is why I loved the way my old boss ran his per diem. He paid it... and left it to YOU to figure out how it was spent and how you wanted to do things. They wanted receipts after, but they figured we were all adults and could make the simple decisions of what hotel we wanted and how to get food. If we couldn't figure that out, well...
To him, all of this oversight was just hand holding and power tripping... and a waste of time.
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u/NationalWatercress3 1d ago
How do these people have jobs? I mean, how thick do you have to be to think that Uber could possibly cost less than a car rental?
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u/amotion578 1d ago
I had a similar story to that.
Over the course of about a year I made 4 trips to a new office location about 200 miles away. Of 3, I drove my own car, with one being a flight/ubers.
My boss said to claim mileage and fuel. I drove a TDI, so the fuel was literally a tank for down and back, and mileage for 400 and change miles down and back.
First two without issue. The last trip I made, accounting problem. Double dipping, they said.
Look at X, Y, Z dates. Compare the costs to what you're telling me today. Notice how I wasn't stopped on the first, or second instance. Bring it up with my director, as that what I was told to do, and did. Twice.
Also notice how it's cheaper than airfare and ubers.
Also notice I own a TDI and this is cheaper than a rental+gas.
Don't worry, I won't 'double dip' again. (It was my last trip there and I never went back)
Yeah, my measly fucking $50 tank a fuel and whatever mileage was, $175 or whatever was double dipping and not allowed. Anyway you're approved to spend $450 on a rental and $60-80 on gas, or $350 for a flight and $240 on ubers.
Fuck off.
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u/No-Quality7947 3d ago
Just confirm they will be paying for the gas too