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.
Fed officials also talk about the muni liquidity facility and efforts to help the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Robbie Randall is a member of the Intuit Accountants team. He has a great passion for helping small businesses thrive. Having owned a small business, he understands the heartaches, the triumphs, and the attention it takes to operate one. In his current role, he speaks with hundreds of entrepreneurs weekly and enjoys sharing insights that he’s collected from some of the most successful cloud-based firms. Connect with Robbie on Twitter or LinkedIn @smbizpro.
Andrew Hoag is CEO and founder of Teampay, a leading distributed spend management platform. He has founded four companies, including urbantag in 2011, which tackled the trillion-dollar online-to-offline commerce market and exited in October 2012. In addition to these entrepreneurial and leadership roles, he has served as an angel investor and advisor to many other companies, helping them to raise venture capital and design product strategy. Prior to that, he held management roles in customer engineering, product management, internationalization, business development and marketing at VeriSign, and, before that, he connected and built supercomputers for NASA.
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:
