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.
Dr. Sangeeta Chhabra, co-founder and director of Ace Cloud Hosting, is an entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in the IT sector. She has positioned the company as a global provider of IT and managed cloud services, with its QuickBooks hosting tailored for the accounting sector, as well as its Managed Security Services and public cloud offerings for SMBs and enterprises.
Karen Monks is a Principal Analyst in Celent's North American insurance practice. She brings a broad range of insurance and consulting experience to her work; she has worked as a management consultant to and within insurance carriers and other financial services companies for over 25 years.
Karen's focus is life insurance technology and trends. Her research concentrates on life, all aspects of life insurance processing including illustrations, eApplications and eSignature, new business and underwriting systems, policy administration systems, claims systems, and digital enablement technologies. Her consulting experience at Celent includes new business and underwriting system selections, policy administration system selections, distribution management system selections, vendor product strategy reviews, a life claims system benchmarking project, eApplication and automated underwriting cost analyses, plus several small life insurance technology analyses. Karen led Celent's Knowledge Management team for seven years. The KMC supports Celent's vendor assessments across all practices and helps manage vendor data on Celent's online platform, VendorMatch. She helped build out Celent's VendorMatch Digital Services Platform.
Mary Mulcare, MD, FACEP, is the Chief Medical Officer at Summus and oversees all clinical aspects of operations. Mary also serves as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine, and has held several leadership roles at Weill Cornell, including Director of Undergraduate Medical Education in the Department of Emergency Medicine and Assistant Director of the Margaret and Ian Smith Clinical Skills Center.
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:
