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.
Will Mitchell is co-founder and CEO of Contract Simply, a construction payments platform. As a former real estate developer, he oversaw $400M of construction loans while developing nearly 800 homes and millions of square feet of commercial real estate space.
Jason Collier is co-founder of Scale Computing, a market leader in hyperconverged solutions. Previously, Collier was vice president of technical operations at Corvigo where he oversaw sales engineering, technical support, internal IT and data center operations. Prior to Corvigo, Collier was vice president of information technology and infrastructure at Radiate. There he architected and oversaw the deployment of the entire Radiate ad-network infrastructure, scaling it from under one million transactions per month when he started to more than 300 million at its peak.
Clark Downum is a developer at Redox, an integration platform that securely and efficiently exchanges healthcare data.
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:
