Having had a varied career including government, private sector, large company, small company, non-profit, sole proprietor I'd thought I'd encountered every expense permutation but this is one I haven't. Every corporate credit card I've had was paid by the company and it's not hard to see how making the employee pay and submit an expense would build resentment particularly if reimbursement was slow.

I've probably run the gamut and encountered everything else from very generous, fast reimbursing employers and clients to miserable regimes that paid slowly, offered laughable per diems or nitpicked every single line item. I never took advantage of the good ones, became very creative with the bad ones and have had my share of conflicts with the bean counters.

I've posted my most memorable battle before on this site. It was after a trip to Africa during which a colleague and I were diverted to do a list minute site visit of a possible acquisition. We needed to buy PPE and when we submitted the receipts the accounting nerd didn't want to reimburse us arguing that we would be keeping the equipment. The next day we brought the equipment into his office in transparent bags, dropped it on his desk with a warning that we'd left it outside overnight before coming home and something might have crawled into the boots. He went white, told us to get the bags out of his office and we received the reimbursement checks later that day.