Employees working from home during the coronavirus pandemic claimed some outlandish expenses this year, including pricey exercise bikes, facelifts and private jets.
Emburse, an expense management software company, released a compilation Wednesday of some of the craziest expenses it has seen claimed this year, some of which were actually approved. That included $1,895, which was approved as a contribution for an employee's Peloton Bike under the explanation of “for health and wellness.” On the other hand, a $7,600 expense claim for a facelift was submitted under the category of “repairs and maintenance” but was rejected, despite the pressing need to look one’s best during a Zoom meeting.
Gaurav Banga is founder and chief executive officer of Balbix.
Rob Sobers is a senior director at cybersecurity firm Varonis. He has been writing and designing software for over 20 years and is co-author of the book “Lean Ruby the Hard Way,” which has been used by millions of students to learn the Ruby programming language. Prior to joining Varonis in 2011, Sobers held a variety of roles in engineering, design and professional services.
Carmen Carey is the chief operating officer at Unbabel. The firm's products eliminates language barriers between companies and their customers by combining bespoke neural machine translation (NMT), advanced automated quality estimation, and a global human network of tens of thousands of ‘Unbabelers’, who post-edit the automatic translations to professional quality.
Some expenses weren’t for working from home, but more about getting out of the house safely. An expense claim for a private jet charter costing over $20,000 was submitted and approved under the explanation of “required to limit COVID exposure for international shoots.” Another travel-related expense claim was $2,500 for a helicopter ride, which was not approved.
The $79 expense claim for a dog crate could perhaps be used for travel at some point when that's safer, but in these times it was more plausibly to provide "crate training [for] a new COVID puppy to not run into Zoom meetings."
Below is an infographic produced by Emburse showing this and several other head-scratching claims:
