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.
Jeremy R. Newell is executive managing director, head of regulatory affairs and general counsel of The Clearing House Association.
André Christ is co-founder and co-CEO of LeanIX. André's passion lies in enabling organizations and their employees to build better products by moving to a modern IT architecture. Before André co-founded LeanIX, a software-as-a-service vendor, he gained extensive experience as a management consultant at the world’s largest logistics company. In this role, he advised CIOs and IT leaders on strategic topics at the interface of business and IT. Projects included the execution of a global IT complexity reduction program and the definition of an IT service and cost charging model for their world-wide data centers. During his studies of information science in Germany and France, he built modern software architectures for both startups and large enterprises. He is a global thought leader and has spoken at several high-influence industry events including Gartner’s EA Summit, Hamburger IT Strategy Days and Rethink! IT.
Paulina Gonzalez-Brito is executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition.
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:
