The coolest travel expense claim in the history of mankind

[RISP]

https://twitter.com/x/status/626812956148248577

In 1969, Buzz Aldrin had to fill in a travel voucher for his trip to the moon to receive USD 33.31. How awesome is that?!

 

[pb4uski]

That is a cool one.

I used to have to approve all expense reports for our 30-person office... had some real characters and some interesting stories.

 

[RISP]

Would love to hear some, if you don't mind sharing.

 

[DrRoy]

After Apollo 13, Grumman Aircraft (the builder of the lunar module) sent North American Aviation (the builder of the command and service modules) a bill for towing for $417,421.24.

 

[aaronc879]

In 1969, Buzz Aldrin had to fill in a travel voucher for his trip to the moon to receive USD 33.31. How awesome is that?!

I get $.54/mile this year when I do contract work. How many miles is the moon away?

 

[pb4uski]

Would love to hear some, if you don't mind sharing.

My favorites were both with one guy, who traveled a lot, was chronically in arrears on his expense reports and who a couple times I cut him off from any more travel advances until he turned in some expense reports.

Anyhow, one time he sees me in the hall and asked if he could put in for a pair of pajamas that he had left behind during a trip. Not!

But the other one was a doozy. He told me that he was in a hurry to the airport early one morning to catch a flight and that he had the emergency brake on the whole way and as a result had to have new brakes and wondered if he could put it through his expense report. While I came very close to replying "No, because stupidity is not an ordinary and necessary business expense" I held my tongue and just said that our expense policy did not allow for that.

I'm sure that we eventually paid for it in dribs and drabs.

DD now has a similar position to mine at that time and recently had an exec submit her pet sitting bill as part of her travel expenses for a business trip. I wonder if that exec and the moron that I had to deal with are related.

 

[athena53]

A few favorites:

Entry-level people took a job candidate out for dinner and submitted an expense for video game tokens. I approved it.

Another entry-level with shady credit had a secured credit card. He made the regular payment but had to go visit a client on short notice and the hotel put a hold on the funds on the card when he checked in, so he incurred late fees. Boss turned down request that late fees be reimbursed.

Not-so-bright accountant commuting into our NYC office (usually based in NJ) for 2 weeks claimed to have bought daily tickets, not the discounted weekly ones. (This was back when there was less use of credit cards.). No idea what they did; he didn't report to me.

 

[MRG]

I traveled internationally before Megacorp had throughly thought out the process so there were interesting challenges.

My boss's new administrative assistant filled out an early one, a six week trip. There was $1000 in cash the CIO handed me in London, several thousand from my personal account drawn in Amsterdam. We were taking trains daily and at the time they required cash. Corporate had to up my CC max several times for airfare and hotels. Finally there was a hundred dollars for a DR in Amsterdam. I'd brought a 30 day supply of my BP meds and I needed it badly. Corporate was not happy about the DR bill as rightfully I had insurance. The admin asked how to fill out the forms for the overseas Dr visit and she won. They did say that expense report would be used as requirements for their policies.

 

[Sunset]

I was to be sent to another country to help update a system, but I didn't have a passport.
So they approved my expedited passport cost
Then later, 2 days before the trip, they gave a $100 bonus and cancelled the trip, said I could talk the UK team through it over the phone

 

[RISP]

I get $.54/mile this year when I do contract work. How many miles is the moon away?

238,900 miles one way, but don't you have to use your own vehicle to claim that?

 

[aaronc879]

238,900 miles one way, but don't you have to use your own vehicle to claim that?

Good point.

 

[Gumby]

Way back when I was in law school, the goal of most law students was to land a summer associate position in a large firm for the summer between the 2nd and 3rd years of school. Unlike many internships, you got paid as a summer associate, and you assisted the firm lawyers in various tasks, typically research. Occasionally, the lawyers would take a summer associate with them when they went to court, or a deposition or a client meeting out of the office. The idea was that by the end of the summer, both the firm and the student would have had a good opportunity to size each other up, and normally, the student would get an offer for full time employment the next year after he or she graduated.

One fine day, a fellow summer associate went out of the office to a deposition with one of the firm's lawyers. Normally, depositions break for lunch, but on this day, the firm lawyer and his opposite number agreed to work right through lunch so they could end early. After the deposition and on his way back to the office, the intrepid summer associate stopped at Brooks Brothers and bought a tie. Reasoning that the firm would have reimbursed him for lunch if he had not worked straight through, he submitted a reimbursement for the tie instead. Needless to say, he did not get reimbursed for the tie, nor did he receive an offer of full time employment.

 

[ohyes]

Many years ago i worked in an art museum where the Director wanted reimbursement for underwear he had purchased in NYC on a buying trip for the museum. He had forgotten to pack his underwear.

The board of directors refused to pay, and the Director would not leave it alone. He was incensed and ranted about it to anyone who would listen; he felt the board was being extremely unreasonable. It seemed to be the beginning of his undoing at the museum and he was let go about a year later.

 

[MRG]

Many years ago i worked in an art museum where the Director wanted reimbursement for underwear he had purchased in NYC on a buying trip for the museum. He had forgotten to pack his underwear.

The board of directors refused to pay, and the Director would not leave it alone. He was incensed and ranted about it to anyone who would listen; he felt the board was being extremely unreasonable. It seemed to be the beginning of his undoing at the museum and he was let go about a year later.

Megacorp did buy me underwear and a nice dress shirt from the Marriott gift shop. We'd gone to Boston for an overnighter and got stuck one more day and leave at COB. Except a week later there we were, still in Boston. Would have had laundry done except we were going home every day!

The whole thing was a nightmare as we checked out every day, one day no rooms at the Marriott. We stayed at a very historic hotel with the original women of the evening in residence. I swear one of the gals was in the hotel in 1776 and the piano player wearing a yellow plaid suit wasn't much younger. It was a very bizarre trip without the clothes, women, and George Burns wanna be. The client took our return tickets and claimed we could not leave. Sure we could have but... he was an interesting a $$hole.

I heard someone else tried gift shop clothes, with a lame excuse, and payed their own way.

 

[Alan]

For the very first expense claim I ever had to approve I was forced to take it to my boss and he told me that it was the most perplexing claim he'd ever seen.

The claim was for a 2 week trip and included:

1. putting the hire car through a car wash on a 2 week trip, because it was very dirty from the slushy roads and she was in danger of getting her clothes dirty

2. laundry bill for dirty clothes

3. 6 purchased books because a flight was delayed enough to include an overnight stay in a hotel

4. Dentist bill because she broke a tooth.

There were several more items along similar lines.

 

[oldphd]

We once had our boss tell us at our group of several people meeting that it was very important to file your travel expenses in a timely manner. Seems that someone in our group hadn't and it caused a problem.

One of our guys was known as a crazy man, who would go out on site to do mechanical testing of problems (engineering consulting) and work 24 hours straight and more, and generally was solely focused on the problem at hand. While the customers liked the attention (think steel line that is down, costing serious money while not operating), nobody cared to work with him because he wasn't all that nice. He also wasn't at the meeting, so we all speculated that he was the one. The rest of us are looking at each other and denying it, and we'd known each other long enough to believe everyone.

After a few minutes of this, the boss pipes up and says it wasn't him, stop picking on him. We told the boss we didn't believe him. Finally, the boss fesses up and says it was him (the boss) who had done it He didn't want to admit what he'd done to us. Then he shared what had happened.

He hadn't turned in his expenses for several trips over a period of about 10 months, and then did them all at once because the fiscal year was almost up. He figured it was a free float of money to the company so why would they care? Just guessing that it was something on the order of $25-30K. By the time he had this out and we're ribbing him, he started to joke about how it elevated his image, because he had gotten a personal phone call from the CFO! This was maybe a 2,000 person company, and we were a 30 person group that had been purchased in another state and were pretty much an island. While I'm not an accountant, my understanding is that the expenses needed to be handled in the period they'd occurred and while not a lot of money in the big picture, they had to restate some figures that they thought were final.