The whole point of a company is to make money, so it is understandable that they need to keep track of expenses.

When employees do a lot of driving, the company usually needs to reimburse them for the fuel and may want to track this by collecting receipts each month.

While this isn’t a bad idea on its own, sometimes they go a little overboard like they did in this story.

Check out the details below.

Oh you want ALL my fuel receipts every month? Certainly! Make some room…

We had a new office admin start in the expenses department, who decided that all the rules were to be followed to the letter – and if it made it inconvenient for people to claim expenses back so much the better!

Reducing costs by making the employees cover them if they make one small mistake. Nice.

It’d make her department look far more efficient, reducing costs and all.

At the time I was working in a group of four people, going out to fix things in remote places.

We had one company Landrover, which two guys went in, another guy used his own van and claimed for the diesel, and I used my own old Range Rover which was ridiculously suitable for getting out into the trackless wastes.

Seems like a pretty good system so far.

The guys in the company Landrover just used the company fuel card, and the other two of us claimed for our mileage.

But then, I got my mileage back with a note saying that in future, they would not accept the claim without every fuel receipt for the month being attached in full.

What a hassle. Why isn’t a simple copy of the receipt sufficient?

No copies, no partial receipts, and definitely enough fuel indicated on the receipts to cover the distance claimed for.

Right then, it’s like that, is it?

As I mentioned I drove an old Range Rover (still do, in fact). It’s big, it’s heavy, it has a ridiculous 4.6 liter V8 engine so it can drag trailers up mountains easily, and it gets through a lot of gas.

No no, not “gas” like “gasoline”, like the Americans call it.

This is Scotland. We call that petrol.

I only ever put about a gallon or two of petrol in a month, just enough to get the engine started and warmed up.

Interesting, I’ve never heard of a vehicle being converted to run on propane.

Like a lot of older vehicles with big thirsty engines, it’s converted to run on propane.

There’s a big tank in the back where the spare wheel would go, a bit of extra plumbing, and a special controller to adapt the fuel injection system to cope.

With gas being about half the price of petrol it made a lot of economic sense, especially when I was claiming for anything up to 2000 miles of travel a month.

That is a *lot* of propane.

That’s filling the tank about ten times a month, and they want a receipt for every fill-up.

So, here’s where the MC kicks in.

I started fueling up at the local Calor gas depot, making sure I got them to print me off a full receipt for it.

Hey, he is only complying with the office manager’s demands.

Each receipt was three pages of the pink copy of tractor-feed duplicate paper, and you just know it was the wide-carriage 14.5″ stuff.

Wads and wads and F****** wads of bright pink tractor paper for every claim.

The policy lasted three months, then they decided they only needed the first receipt for the month as long as it had a VAT number on it.

A week after they changed the policy, Calor stopped doing Autogas so I had to start getting normal receipts from the supermarket filling station instead.

I really get a lot of joy out of these stories where people simply follow instructions, much to the regret of the manager.

Let’s take a look at what some other people on Reddit thought of the story.

Maybe this was more just compliance than malicious compliance?

They should be paying for way more than just the fuel.

I’m learning all sorts of new things about fuel options today.

And I thought my car getting 23MPG was bad.

I’m glad to see I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know this was possible.

Great job doing as you were told.

Sometimes it’s all that’s required!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.