I never let it bother me because I make a good salary, recieve fair recognition for accomplishments, and recieve raises often. When I started, the company was very small, and I have outlasted every member of our staff. I am now most senior person at the company besides the owners. The company has doubled in size since I have been there, and I have witnessed the company get burned on several occasions by employees. It usually goes through cycles. It seems like there is always one person who is trying to cheat of company, and when they get caught, one person in the next wave of new hires burns the company. They burned the company several ways. Either lying about credintials, what time they arrived and left work, taking several hour lunch breaks, ect. Because of just a few bad apples they have implemented a lot of policies that really are starting to grind my gears.

I took this job to work at a small company that didn’t breathe down your kneck as long as you were profitable employee. Because of being burned, they recently hired a woman who does not have a college degree or any formal training to start an HR department at a company where everyone but the secratary and her have degrees. She looks over weekly status reports, expense reports, time off request ect. She is extremely anal about things that she shouldn’t be, and she seems to put me under the microscope more than anyone else. Her first week she told the owners that at the end of the day and the begining of the day I talk to the other employees and make the company unproductive for about 10 minutes. This is true, but it is because i am thier supervisor, and while most of what i am saying to them is “water cooler talk”, I think it raises moral, commrodery (sp), and I do give assignments when we finish catching up. I basically got repremanded by my boss for wasting billable hours, even though I bill well over the company’s required minimum of 35 a week. I cut out all the nonsense talking, but she still was reporting that nothing had changed. She started mistaking team meetings for social gatherings. I explained it all to the owners, but they just take her side. I now do all correspondance via email, so I do not get falsely accused of idle chatter.

Since that date there have been a number of other changes and accusation of people doing small things that cost the company money. I am very meticulous for following the rules and have done what the owners have asked, but I have also been keeping records of when excessive repremanding by HR for non serious violations or non violations occure.

Recently I took a hour and half lunch, which is perfectly acceptable as long as make up the extra time at the end of day. The next week when I was working in the field, I recived a very threatening and mean spirited email from our HR lady with talk of punishment and docking my pay for the extended lunch. I told her to recheck my office log to verify I worked 8 hours. She refused to check it because she said she already had. I asked her to double check it, and she said she had already done that as well. At this point, I started get nervous that someone had doctored the log, or that I mistakenly logged out of the office at 5 out of habit. I told I understood, and if i made the mistake i would pay the consequences, but I wanted a copy of the log on my desk when I returned, and I wanted to review the original. Suddenly, everything was cleared up, and she reviewed it a “third time” and found that I had infact worked my 8 hours. I went to owners of the company about the situation, and made my case that we were being treated like children and it was causing moral to drop, people to start seeking other jobs, and people starting to do just the bare minimum. The ownersdid take action, but it was not nearly what i had hoped for.

Because of all the recent changes, every little thing that the company does seems to irritate me including the mileage. I drove over 700 miles roundtrip to a recent project. I got 25 cents a mile for my gas and wear and tear, and they recieved 25 cents a mile for nothing. I also do something I never did before; I participate in talk of how the company is screwing us with fellow employees.

Recently, I took another business trip, this time flying, and I did not rent a car because I did not want to wait three to be reimbursed for it, and cabs are cheaper anyway. When I arrived at my hotel, I was pleasantly surprised that they had a complimentary shuttle, that could take me everywhere I needed to go. I used the shuttle most of the week, but one night stayed out at a bar (on my own dime of course) with a colleage past the last shuttle time. I took a cab home, and was got a reciept for reimbursement, since I ate dinner at the bar as well and would have needed transportaion home dinner whether i had stayed for drinks or not. The cab drive asked if i needed extra reciepts, and I asked what for. He said lots of businessmen who stay there use them to pad expense reports. They say they took cabs when they usually take shuttles. Before all the changes at the company, I would never have dreamed of taking advantage, but now I feel differently. I took the extra blank reciepts. I am planning on filling them out to make up for all the wear and tear on my vehicle i do not get reimbursed for. I do feel bad about it, but I would also feel like a sucker if I did not at least attempt to get some of my losses on my vehicle back.

I used to love the company, and I looked at their success as my success. I not longer feel that way. I feel they owners are getting too greedy, and for the first time, I feel like it is us vs. them. It is a sad day, and I hope I find a new job soon.

Have reasonable T&E policies that apply to all. For anyone in New York, when can employees take a car or cab home? Don’t penalize employees who commute farther. Go to perdiem reimbursements for breakfast, lunch should be covered by the ee, and then actuals for dinner. Or just go straight to per diems. Let ee’s decide what hotel they stay at within a budget. And encourage use of a rental car rather than a personal car when travelling out of town.

And I’ve heard many cases over the years of employees taking the more expensive option simply because it would be easier to document their expenses. Or because they felt cheap if they included legitimate, small, cash expenses. If the reimbursement system is run in such a way that employees feel like they are being put on the defensive, they are much more likely to do a little padding.

I recently got a $50 parking ticket for not turning/cramping my tires against a curb when parking on an uphill slope. Please note my meter was not expired. Naturally, I am frustrated.

I want to turn in my parking violation and get reimbursed. Of course, parking violations are not a reimburseable item. After all, I am driving down there for business, I have never once expensed my 4-years of parking meter coins, and I believe I am doing the right thing to not have cost the company the $1,000+ of parking lot rates I “could” of parked at.

As an honest person who learns from mistakes, I am sure I will always turn my tires. However, I am disgruntled that I probably am eating the $50 ticket. Moreover, “just to be safe” I am thinking I’d now rather always park in the premium lots to never have this happen again where it is now out of my pocket. My assumption is the company won’t really recognize all savings from avioding the downtown parking lot cost that I have and am saving the company. I am curious if I should even attempt to turn in this ticket and debate its legitimacy. I do not want to sound childish saying “fine, I will always park in the lot then…”

Has any one else come across this situation as the accounting manager? Or as the person seeking reimbursement for a parking violation?

How do people normally get reimbursed for the dimes, quarters and nickels for parking meters that add up over years…?

When I redid the expense report with the creative accounting, the difference was less than $50, which was still quite a bargain for the company in light of what reasonable and customary expenses could have been for that trip. I sleep just fine at night, Mike. Thanks for your concern.

Now you tell me just why a very small parking expense on the weekend should (of course!) be rejected. Because the destination wasn’t business-related? I beg to differ. The company sent me away from hearth and home for two weeks. I was there over the weekend because the company wanted me there. Not to transact business on the weekend; just because driving home and back for the weekend would have cost $0.22 per mile and I wouldn’t have been well rested for Monday morning. That makes my presence in the remote city “business-related,” doesn’t it?

Look at it this way: If I had gone into the city for dinner and paid a flat $6 to park, and had dinner, then went back to the hotel, the company would have paid for both dinner and parking. But according to your reasoning, if I parked in that same lot, paid the same $6, went to an orchestra concert, then grabbed dinner and went back to the hotel, my act of attending a concert somehow makes that parking fee non-reimbursable, even though I didn’t ask for reimbursement of the concert ticket. Express all the moral outrage you want; there is no way for you to rationalize away the manager’s wrongness for rejecting the parking.

Of course, that doesn’t make my subsequent creative accounting OK. I was wrong to do it, and I admit it. My point was simply to note that not all cheating is one-sided, and a business might be smart to examine its rules if it experiences rampant expense report inflation. But your sanctimony and judgment are way over the top for something like this. I might well inquire how you can sleep at night, knowing that you’re screwing your associates out of reasonable travel expense reimbursements on the basis of trumped up rules that don’t stand the test of rational analysis.

Oh, and yes, I do sleep under a nice down comforter, as a matter of fact. They’re almost a necessity in the winter up here in Sioux Falls. I highly recommend them. Just make sure you get an appropriate thickness–hard to believe, but if you get one that’s too thick, even when it’s -40° outside, you’ll still be too warm under the comforter! And just to ease your mind, I paid for the comforter with very legitimately earned salary.

Darned if, during my revision, I didn’t suddenly develop simultaneous selective amnesia with respect to having brought breakfast foods and false memory syndrome concerning having eaten breakfast in some nice restaurants during those two weeks! And what a coincidence that the final result wound up being several dollars more than the original, by just about the cost of a zoo and theme park admission! Bet no one could have seen that coming.

Treat your traveling associates right, and they’ll… well, I guess to be honest, most of ‘em will try to screw ya anyway, but there are certainly some of us who, if you treat us right, will return the favor. But if you try to squeeze us, we’re going to squeeze right back.