Yup. If you think I spent too much show me how I reasonably could have spent less. No answer, don't expect me to incur reimbursable expenses.

Fortunately, I've always had reasonable bosses.

It can be both ways in the same company after some time...

So what happens when you outsource T/E to India or Philippines? Well, your ER is denied because there is no receipt from $2.75 coin operated parking meter charge (it was actual case with me about 5 years ago). Last year new procedures were placed, with deep analytics of ERs after submission and now about 98% are automatically approved.

Hardly any scrutiny, but I'm not booking luxury hotels or eating at Ruth Chris every night. I've never been told "you can't spend more than $xx on meals, or $xxx on hotels" though hotels depend on the locations. Airfare, yeah, I have had big fights with corporate travel who want us to take the red-eye or the 0500 departures but I've figured out how to game the travel portal so that's not a big problem anymore. I always clear big group meals with my boss beforehand.

I don't question travel spend unless there's a clear need to do so. Most people aren't greedy jerks. The ones who are either don't get to travel anymore, if they're otherwise useful, or they get to enjoy the freedom to find another job.

Per diem is the win-win I think. Now we have policy of US $60 per day for US/EU travel and the only other entries in ER for most people would be hotel, car rental and gas.

Depends where you are. Per diem for us is taxable income...

I'd rather have it as a taxable income and then deduct the amount from 1040 as work related expense than enter $2.75 parking fees and $5 cart rental at SFO line by line...

Then you should never accept a position in government. The rules he lives under are not atypical in government organizations where expenses are often open to media scrutiny.

Yep. It's all about government rules (and I know exactly about the bid deadline issue cited above -- government deadlines are unforgivably set in stone and any company should rather pay a parking fine than to miss a deadline on a bid!). In most cases, it is the state laws that are the most penalizing, which my state legislature passes so they can tell constituents that they are holding government accountable and we bad government 'employees' aren't cheating the "taxpayer". Other states have more forgiving policies but the paperwork/approvals problem is the same everywhere. What is annoying is I very rarely travel on anything that could possibly be actual taxpayer (or even tuition) derived money - the actual money I use for travel is directly traced to an agreed upon budget line in a grant I secured from either federal agencies with more forgiving rules (though, still onerous in many regards) and, increasingly so over time, from private companies who really don't give two hoots about the details in travel expense costs (from both start-up firms surviving on venture capital money, and large companies represented on the DOW). I literally have the state legislature come between me and my research sponsors (while the university is taking a 50% overhead fee on the travel expenses to begin with). If other aspects of my job weren't great, this is something that would help push me into private industry (and is something, nonetheless, that might push me to work at a different state or private university).

Occasionally, we used to have a blow out party called a "per diem buster" on a longer road trip if we all had cash left over. Many a HIX lobby has had cases of empties and pizza boxes thrown out at 200AM.

In Canada it is not taxable :D and my last employer always paid it in cash before you traveled. If I was gone 2 weeks I had $600 US in my pocket that I just put on the c/c and ate IHG hotel free breakfasts and bought a meal at WalMart for every night. Ka-ching !! Pocketed about $7,500 per year.

No accountability whatsoever which was nice. But it never got increased in 5 years either.

Would you change your mind if it were taxed at a marginal rate of over 40%?

I must admit, with my old company's expense system, which even needed you to select the correct VAT rate for the country you were travelling in and the expense type (yes, really) from an at best semi-ordered list, covering current and deprecated rates for every country in the world, it was tempting. At least the countries I visited had a no-tipping culture, so I was spared all that nonsense. But we did have to do itemised public transport accounts (rather than claiming for the smartcard top-up).

Which jogs my memory. The most painful one used to be mobile phone receipts. We were encouraged to BYOD (bring your own device), and we'd claim back phonecalls. Which was pretty good value for the company, as the roaming deals we got were better than the corporate deals anyway. But you had to go through your statement line by line, which was painful.

Then they decided that, rather than claiming at the currency rate your card (whether ATM or credit) converted at, you had to claim at the (pre-filled) bank rate for that day, and then file an additional claim for the currency loading, with documented evidence for it. I think they assumed people wouldn't bother, but they underestimated the bloody-mindedness of someone who feels cheated. In this case, and the case of the mobile phone, I only have online statements, so would download these and edit the PDF so that all personal transactions and unnecessary details were blanked out. Oh, they did not like this. It took a lot of reminders about the law and exactly what was their business and what was not before they backed down.

So yes, per diem is great. But not when nearly half of it disappears to the taxman, and the rest of it is barely adequate to survive on a diet of IKEA meatballs when you're visiting the Nordics.

No.

Because it is not the per diem is taxable at 40%, it is your ordinary income is in the bracket which is taxable over 40%. Congratulations, BTW.

This. Absolutely.

A few years back I needed to go to London from San Diego. I discovered that if I went from Tuesday to Tuesday rather than Monday to Friday, the fares were SIGNIFICANTLY lower...on the order of 3k dollars less. I could save the company 3000 dollars by doing that, and factoring the two extra days of hotel and meals I would still be saving them about 2200 dollars.

I thought I was being brilliant. Over 2 grand in savings..how could they not approve? So I told the boss about it. His response? "We are not paying for you to have a weekend in London". Ok..spend the extra 3000 dollars then..but you were the one who wrote the memo that we need to reduce travel costs.

At another company, they suddenly got strict about rental car preferred vendors. They absolutely insisted I use Avis..however, even with the corporate rate we got, Hotwire provided enough savings to be more economical. Sometimes 50% less for the same class of car. I could have saved the company hundreds per trip..but they wouldn't let me. Avis it was.

One boss actually took me aside years ago, a company with a very easy (non existent) travel policy. Instead of praising me, he gave me a hard time for being number 1 in sales, but number 8 in expenses. He said I was making the others look bad, and that would not be tolerated... That same boss didn't praise me when I received the largest commission check in the 60 year history of the company, instead he called and said he would revamp the comp plan to avoid such large checks. I left the company a week later.

Well, have you ever put examples like that in a memo and sent it to your boss? Sometimes companies don't see the big picture as you say but if they don't see it, then duhhh, someone has to show it to them.

I once got an employer to re-imburse the annual fee I paid for a credit card. My reasoning was that if I used that card to pay for rental cars when on business travel, I did not need to pay for rental insurance as the credit card gave me that coverage. The insurance cost on one rental was about as much as the annual fee for the credit card. It didn't take a genius to figure out that was to the company's advantage and agree to pay it. Even my boss was smart enough to figure that out. :D

What I didn't bother mentioning to my boss was the other perks that card gave me. That's what you call a win/win. The company saved money and I got see extras without paying for the card.