Claims procedure

I'm owed £400 this month.
From expenses.
There's a word that brings both delight and terror to the claimant.

As you regular readers know I have worked for many organisations - therefore, by dint of my work, I have had to claim expenses throughout my working life and the experience has varied from one end of the spectrum 'Here is the rule for everything and you will obey, exterminate, exterminate' to 'Dunno really just claim what you think is reasonable'. Both ends are as difficult as each other.

Let's go for a stroll to the 'We have rules' end. This company, a substantial multi-national had an expenses form that an accountant must have devised with codes for everything and a strict requirement to account for VAT. Receipts WERE required or you were shot. No, thinking about it, your expenses were just not signed off and you starved. The rules were made and kept by two elderly house elves who maintained the company archives and who were locked away night and day on the fifth floor where the company library was located. Here giant dusty tomes were opened with the spine of the book creaking as the heavy pages were turned. 'You may claim for a car wash each week with no receipt as long as it does not cost more than £2.50'.
'Right then' we'd ask, 'can we just claim £2.50 a week and put it on the expense form?'
'Yes' the house elves would reply.
So we'd claim the £2.50 a week and the cars would get dirtier and dirtier (as, of course we didn't wash them) until we could convince a car dealer to clean them for us - for free.
'Field staff can claim £2.50 a day for lunch without a receipt.'
'Can we claim that every day whether at home or in the office or on an interplanatery trip?'
Well of course we could and did, and most days the dealers bought us lunch anyway. Fuel was a good one as well. You claimed on a pence per mile basis according to a fuel rate. Basically, unless you were driving in excess of 100 mph in second gear all the time, you made a substantial profit on fuel.
And this was all condoned by the management - no wonder few members of the field staff wanted to return to head office for promotion - you couldn't afford the drop in salary. It all started getting difficult when my then manager started asking me to get blank receipts from restaurants, get an amount filled in, claim that amount and when reimbursed, pay him the money in cash so he could go horse racing. We were talking serious amounts of money here - then some of my colleagues who lived in my territory, thought it would be a jolly good jape to take their friends/wives/mistresses out for a meal and get me to claim the bill as 'entertaining' and then pay them back, 'No problem the boss will sign it off'. Bit of a problem really as are you really going to shop an influential and senior manager and then continue to have a career in the same company? The only answer was to join the CIA, become a hit man and take him out. Actually I had a quiet word with another manager and it all stopped, as did my career, but at least I didn't do anything dishonest as I said to the manager of the Job Centre as I signed on. The daft thing was that you make a substantial profit on your expenses by just claiming them as allowed - you didn't need to make dishonest claims

Wandering across to the other end of the spectrum we have the company that has no rules and has an expense form that is basically a blank piece of A4 where you write your name at the top. For this company, Consolidated Who-Hahs, I travelled the world selling who-hahs to anyone that would buy them.
"Can I travel business class?'
'Suppose so'
'Can I stay in 5 star hotels and claim laundry as I am away for several weeks?'
'Seems fair'
'Can I arrange my flights so that at weekends I can stay in fabulously exotic resorts at the companies expense?'
"S'all right.'
'Can I eat like a King and buy the most expensive wines in the world, smoke the most prestigious cigars and be waited on by fair hand maidens selected from the world's most beautiful women who I will fly in especially?'
'Spect so'
You see, no rules and the net effect was that I would actually travel like a penurious student to save the company money that I hadn't been expected to save anyway it would seem. Of course they had no idea what I was claiming as all the receipts were in Thai/Vietnamese/Saudi/Brazilian thingies and so on and the Caribbean island I was actually buying on the basis of expenses was never spotted.

And so we have variations on that theme across the expenses spectrum - right now I work for a reasonable company that takes a reasonable view and therefore expenses claimed are always reasonable. Still got a big form to fill in though and the phrase 'I need a receipt please' is still in daily use. And will be for years. Spect.