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.
With Forrester since July 2005, Diego primarily contributes to and advises on Forrester's offerings for Application Development & Delivery Professionals. He partners with Forrester's global application leaders and is a leading expert on SDLC processes and practices, covering topics such as Agile development, Agile and Lean transformations, Agile development sourcing strategies and services, Agile testing practices and tools, DevOps, and software testing and quality, with a key focus on systems of engagement. Diego also covers software delivery metrics, artificial intelligence, and open source governance.
His 28 years of industry experience, in addition to application development, allow him to give expert advice on change management programs for optimizing the overall modern application delivery process, execute technology management assessments, review technology management strategies, and make comparisons. He also has experience in complex mission-critical project and client engagement management.
Previous Work Experience
Prior to joining Forrester, Diego held international management positions covering various roles, such as director consultant at Meta Group and head of Agile product development for advanced reuse methods and technologies at Quartersoft. He was also regional VP and director for consulting at Genesis/Iona, where he helped many clients transition to distributed applications. He also worked as an enterprise architect and project/product manager, participating in various pan-European projects. He started out as a software engineer, developing AI tools and early graphical user interface technologies at Olivetti.
Diego has also been very active in global open software standards consortia such as OMG, contributing to the early specifications of middleware standards such as CORBA and model-driven architecture. He has been a frequent speaker and panelist at many European conferences on software development.
Diego has published various research reports on open source, software reuse, semantic Web, and object technology, including the AI book Practical Experience in Building Expert Systems.
Education
Diego received a master's degree in computer science from Pisa University in Italy, and he specialized in artificial intelligence through on-site courses at Stanford University and SRI Palo Alto during a two-year working internship with Olivetti in the US.
David Flower is chief executive officer at VoltDB.
Luisa Brenton is a business and technology blogger who covers a variety of hardware and software topics.
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:
