Travel expenses? Really?

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

It's not exactly headline news that a football governing body is up to its neck in shit about allegations of improper payments, backhanders, tax evasion or corruption. But it is amusing that the President, Ahmad Ahmad, is himself accused of falsely claiming travel ticket expenses for trips he didn't take. I mean come on, if you can cover up paying millions of pounds to a mate on an apparently fictitious deal, are you really going to go to the bother of falsely claiming a plane ticket, two gin and tonics and a bag of cashew nuts?

[Janik]

Grifters gonna grift.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Having often been involved in the paying of these things over the years, I find it's always the highest paid people who are most keen to claim expenses. I've seen someone on a six figure salary claim for a one mile round trip, to go to a meeting at an office half a mile away. I've also seen highly paid people brought down by over-claiming being discovered, though suspect it was usually a lightning rod for something else.

[ursus arctos]

I've seen some egregious cases involving people on seven and eight figure salaries (Dollars, not Lire)

Some people just do it because they can.

[Sits]

The best are the coffee claimers. Every coffee drunk off premises between 8:30am and 5:30pm is a “coffee meeting”. They mount up.

[ad hoc]

Occasionally I'll find myself entering expenses and then adding up their actual value and wondering why I bothered. I was in Vietnam in December and in Hanoi I needed to take a taxi every day to where I worked. I dutifully kept all my receipts, and when i got home, scanned them all, and laboriously entered them in my expenses sheet. Then I went to the currency website and worked out how much they;d actually cost me. The total of all of them together was about one tenth of what I was being given daily as a per diem. But having done all this work, I didn't really want to just scrap them, so I claimed anyway. I have this feeling that someone in some finance office is looking at all of this with exactly the same sense of FFS that is being shown on this thread, and I am suitably abashed.

[Wouter D]

My university's travel expense processing unit once bounced a four-digit claim back to me, because they had changed the internal policies and didn't bother to inform me that I had to now also include a credit card statement to display the actual exchange rate used, instead of one I randomly nabbed from Google. So I downloaded the credit card statement, redid the math, and put in the claim again, which was processed and accepted. Net result: three more euros and a few cents for me, and an hour of my life wasted.

I guess this belongs on the office annoyance thread too. I cannot believe that the university thought this was a good idea. The amount of money involved was negligible, especially when you contrast it with the associated destruction of productive hours within both the travel expense processing unit and the faculty.