To avoid that issue, most businesses will avoid reimbursing for incidentals that should be considered income. Suits or standard office clothing, I believe, are taxable in most circumstances. Uniforms are not. Of course there's lots of grey areas that keep accountants in business. I'd assume yoga would count as an exercise allowance and not be taxable, but that's just a guess.

Doing so and then submitting the expense as a steakhouse is dishonest at the _minimum_.

If you disagree, would you also consider it dishonest to submit receipts for the client's transport to and from the steakhouse under the same heading? Or drinks in a bar afterwards? If not, why not?

Who says it wasn't itemized as such? We know nothing about how the expenses system in question works, and a hierarchical submission that looks like

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# Steakhouse business dinner

* Client taxi fare to steakhouse - $xxx

* Steakhouse bill - $xxx

* Strip club bill - $xxx

* Client taxi fare to hotel - $xxx

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with a receipt for each seems perfectly reasonable (to me; apparently you think that it's dishonest for 3 out of 4 of those items to be there) and is consistent with the nonspecific description of events in the article. Evidently, the employee provided enough information for it to be clear that this was a strip club bill, because the auditing system could tell that it was a strip club bill. In order to create a narrative of dishonesty, you're having to add in details that aren't specified in the article and seem to fly in the face of the fact that an audit looking purely at the information submitted identified that it was a strip club bill.

Somehow I just assumed it was universally agreed upon that strip clubs are not something that you go to for business reason.

And if a sales person invites a client to a strip club, they would do so understanding that it's a questionable thing to do, and that they would be smart enough not to file it in their expense report.

Even if their manager said it's okay. I mean, that would just be a perfect reason for the company to fire both the employee and the manager for colluding to defraud a totally ethical company.

Don't presume the sales person is inviting the client.

I do consulting now, and periodically have to go to client sites for presentations and training sessions. There's almost always a big client dinner one of the days we're there. Where we go out to eat, and what we do afterward, is usually driven by client suggestions. In my case, the "after dinner" activities almost always entailed some form of bar hopping, and has never included strip clubs. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't include strip clubs if that's what the client wanted, just that the specific clients I've serviced haven't ever had that particular inclination.

Note that I've only ever been the most senior person present from my company once, and therefore responsible for expensing the client-servicing night. The only direction I was given that time was to keep the client happy and to not blow past the budget for that trip (which had about $5k worth of cushion, after anticipated employee travel expenses). Most of the expenses are passed through to the client however (which is what dictates the budget), and some client agreements do have very strict stipulations on allowable pass-through expenses.

> I just assumed it was universally agreed upon that strip clubs are not something that you go to for business reason.

Not for personal benefit, but in the interest of winning over a client, coke-fueled stripper parties are fair game.

Presumably a coke dealer is dealing in illegal drugs.

It's still SOP for many investment firms...

So, no, he's not trolling you. Since the article didn't provide details, it's very possible that the expense was submitted during the transition time when there was no firm policy banning taking clients to strip clubs.

As an analog I would also consider it dishonest if a company fibs its accounts by booking items into different categories.

There is usually no other reason then to hide an expense, which should not be there.

If a company approves taking customers to strip clubs then there's no reason not to itemize it as such.

> One employee traveling for work checked his dog into a kennel and billed it to his boss as a hotel expense.

I read this as "employee pretended that the kennel expense was a _human_ hotel expense". (And, presumably, the employee stayed with friends/family)

Seems like great software if your goal as an employer is to make your employees outright refuse work-travel or to find a different job without it.

Don't misunderstand: Outright fraud is wrong. But in a lot of cases employer's travel expenditure policy was never fit for purpose, and employees worked around the problems by submitting mis-characterized claims like the dog-kennel example.

Instead of fixing the policy, they'd prefer to ignore WHY employees are doing these things (i.e. talk to them) and just lash out with punitive measures.

Because it's not the sort of expense that companies normally cover. Especially people who travel a lot have all sorts of second and third-order expenses resulting from the fact that they're away from home, may have to dress up for client meetings, etc. that are rarely covered by expense policies. They're also working extra hours when they travel. As partial compensation, many are also expensing fancier meals than they'd have at home--and are presumably being paid a competitive salary that reflects a fair bit of business travel.

Whether all this is "fair" is at least somewhat a value judgement but has been the approximate norm since I first traveled for work a very long time ago.

Which is precisely what my post was saying was an issue with existing policy. I find it a little odd that you'd respond to point out the norm, to a post complaining about the norm, and expect the norm to be in and of itself a justification.

Work created an additional cost via required travel. It isn't at all similar to your "clothing for meetings" example because you'd need those without the travel component. When travel itself creates additional costs: those costs should be compensated.

Maybe the norm is wrong and a company should cover those things. (And the kennel seems to be more directly connected to travel than my other examples.) But it's not really surprising that most don't.

I did work for a company once that had an "offshore inconvenience allowance" fr when we were on rigs and shipyards. It was mostly in the vein of living conditions aren't great and you're working long hours, so here's some extra money. So that's one relatively fair comp mechanism you can use. But mostly it's just baked into people's normal comp plans.

Should've used the tool to select the right category instead of making a human select a category and then dinging them for it. Then Finance can approve or whatever.

The real thievery is the time expense software is stealing from the company by making people pick among all these categories.

If it takes you an hour to fill in expenses, that task just cost the company half a grand.

Oh yes. At my first workplace, I ended up using Emacs keyboard macros to convert from a bank statement dump to a format that could be imported into expense reporting system, and it took me less time than it would take to type in everything manually, because the system UI was so broken.

The article implies that at least some of those receipts were faked.

There's a good chance this company had humans review the receipts and calls it "AI".