20 outrageous expenses employees claimed this year

One thing the pandemic didn’t slow down? Employee attempts to submit some outrageous expenses for reimbursement.

Spend management and risk mitigation technology expert Oversight recently released its Top 10 Most Shocking Expenses list. And it’s got some doozies on it!

In fact, we were able to pull 20 rather “creative” expenses from it.

Wild expenses gone even wilder

While your A/P team has likely seen some new expenses pop up on reports this past year, hopefully they weren’t any of these:

1. motorcycles for all employees
2. a golf trip to Pebble Beach with a “client” (cousin)
3. $1,500 at McDonalds
4. Peloton bikes for everyone in a department
5. dog pedicures
6. bachelor parties
7. $600 sunglasses
8. dog meals at restaurants
9. $500 worth of shots
10. a pet monkey
11. a polo team
12. $1000+ bottle of wine at a dinner for one
13. a Lamborghini
14. drinks for the entire bar during the Super Bowl
15. a $10,000 trip to Disneyworld after their team won the Super Bowl
16. a $500,000 wrist watch
17. the salary of his yacht’s captain
18. an actual yacht
19. “office supplies” at a fancy restaurant (that names its entrees after office supplies), and
20. car repair because an elephant sat on the hood of his rental car.

It’s not just the outrageous expenses that are troublesome

Yes, those wild expenses can be troublesome. But they’re pretty easy to spot.

More troubling: Before the pandemic companies lost an average of $7 million in T&E and P-card fraud for every $1 billion of revenue generated. That’s according to Oversight’s proprietary spend data.

And there’s more to come. Your peers have seen a 292% increase in T&E violation rates since the start of the pandemic. A/P and approving managers need to be more vigilant than ever.