Originally Posted by
der_saeufer
This. Government does a lot of stupid stuff, but this isn't one of them. Excepting the situation where employees are expected to buy for others (e.g. entertaining clients), I don't understand why any organization feels the need to kill trees and waste time scrutinizing receipts for travelers' meal expenses. Set a fair per diem, pay it to everyone and be done with it. If the hotel breakfast is inedible, who cares if I spend $10 getting something edible down the road? If I want to make instant ramen in my hotel room coffee pot for 3 meals a day and save the rest towards a BMW, who but my cardiologist cares? And if I want to spend twice the per diem eating at really nice restaurants, it's my money anyway.
Treating your employees like kindergarteners just breeds resentment--especially when you're micromanaging something as personal and as irrelevant to work as people's food choices... and I say this as someone who's the exact opposite of a picky eater.
+1
and +1 to cbn42's comment above
The original complaint was that an employee traveling on business should be able to expense a breakfast of their own choosing instead of the complimentary hotel breakfast. If they're paid per diem, the complaint woudn't exist because anything you spend above the per diem is out of your own pocket.
Doing per diem would solve two problems -- no need to go through a bunch of receipts, deciding which are okay and which are not -- as well as the picky eaters who can pay out of pocket for their tastes.