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.
Amandeep is chief executive officer and co-founder at Okera, which he launched in 2016 with CTO and co-founder Nong Li. While supporting customer cloud initiatives at Cloudera and playing an integral role at AWS on the Elastic MapReduce team, Amandeep oversaw some of the industry’s largest big data implementations. After witnessing first-hand the challenges companies faced in adopting big data technologies, especially in the cloud, he founded Okera to empower all users with easy data access through a unified, secure and governed platform across heterogeneous sources.
Lisa Froelings is a business and productivity consultant.
Darius Cooper is a software architect with X by 2, a technology consultancy specializing in application and data architecture for the insurance industry.
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:
