alt Hacker NewsI remember at a previous job I had to do a fair bit of business travel. The company had their own internal tool for filing expense reports.
I would do the typical thing of "take picture of receipt, upload receipt, specify how much it cost, etc.", and for the most part it was seemless and it would be sent to my bank account.
One time, I bought a box of Fiber One bars at a CVS Pharmacy and expensed that. I got a phone call from the billing department asking why I would expense something like that and I said something like "because I don't usually eat that healthy during business travel and I suspect you can guess the reason after that". They told me they would get back to me, and then I got an email telling me that they rejected the expense report and I would have to file it again to get the rest of my stuff reimbursed.
I can be a pretty petty dude, so I filed it again, completely unchanged, I get another phone call telling me to remove it, and this repeated two more times. Eventually I complained to my manager and he was able to get them to let me expense it and it all worked out.
I find it amusing, because the box of Fiber One bars was less than five bucks. I suspect all the time that they wasted of theirs and mine probably cost considerably more than the $5 would have saved from not covering it.
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37 signals has a story about this, and the birth of policies & procedures that cost far more than the "crime" they're intended to prevent, because in your case it was $5 in granola bars, but that scenario will repeat itself for the rest of time, and extra resources will likely be dedicated to this "problem area". This seems inevitable as companies grow, and is one of the signals I use that it's close to my time to leave.
Didn't you have a specific per day expense budget? I think there is a department of labor guidance for local travel and a department of state guidance for international travel.
Usually, if your per day expense is less or equal to the guidance (where I work we do $90/day), no one cares. If you go above, you pay. The per day expense is for food. Alcohol cannot be claimed as an expense unless you are in sales.
That is more likely a result of legal requirements. As a general rule any personal benefit you get counts as your income and is taxed accordingly. Expensing is not, instead counting as a business expense.
To avoid people just forming a personal company and declaring everything they spend a business expense and thus not taxed there are rules around what can be counted as a business expense.
If you instead want to take your salary in the form of Fiber One bars, but pay taxes on that spending in dollars, then your accounting department might have had fewer issues since they would not be mixing legally distinct costs and accidentally committing financial fraud.