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.
Drew Tyler is a senior benefits consultant at employee benefits firm Corporate Synergies.
Paco Nathan is known as a "player/coach," with core expertise in data science, natural language processing, machine learning, cloud computing; 35-plus years tech industry experience, ranging from Bell Labs to early-stage start-ups. He is so-chair Rev. Advisor for Amplify Partners, Deep Learning Analytics, Recognai, Data Spartan, Primer. Recent roles include director, Learning Group at O'Reilly Media; director of community evangelism at Databricks and Apache Spark. He was cited in 2015 as one of the Top 30 People in Big Data and Analytics by Innovation Enterprise.
Sean Heide is a cloud security research analyst with the Cloud Security Alliance.
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:
