A work trip can be pretty expensive, but depending on how the employees are compensated for the expenses and their time, it can be even more expensive.

This guy shares how expenses and per diem works at his workplace, and how the employees proved an important point.

Check out the full story!

Expenses vs. Per Diem

Ok, so this is an example of malicious compliance that has been going on at my place of work for at least two decades.

It’s boring and I bet it happens everywhere.

He explains the entire situation…

I work in an industry where what is sold is the time of our employees. This comes with a fair amount of travel.

Our default travel billing is expenses.

For example, we directly bill the hotels, flights and car rental costs to the client. For meals we have a set range we can spend and we can also buy things for the project or treat clients to meals.

Government work and some specific clients demand per diem pricing. You get x dollars a day it has to cover everything.

This is where it gets interesting

So, there is a persistent level of malicious compliance that occurs all the time.

When people are on expenses you tend to find the kind of place that let’s you spend right up to the max for each meal. You get an appetizer and a desert every time you eat.

On per diem you do the opposite and pocket the cash. If you are getting $250 a day per diem then you stay in the cheapest hotel and you get fast food every night and pocket the extra.

It’s the way the office works and nobody cares.

My story really is about a project I worked about 10 years ago.

Things were settled beforehand.

The part of the company I am in was subcontracted by a part of the same company that usually works with our government clients to write a report (Basically we hired ourselves to do the work)

This would involve three site investigations. Those of us traveling to site presumed that since we were doing government work we would be on per diem.

The day before we flew out, we discovered that our company had determined that since we were subtracting to our selves that those of us working for my part of the company would be on expenses since our “client” was another part of our own company.

UH OH…

However, the project team was 1/4 people from my part of the company and 3/4 people who were in the “only government clients” group. That group was by law required to be on per diem.

Cue the malicious compliance.

Those of us on Expenses bought EVERYTHING. All the rental cars where in the names of people on expenses.

Every meal, every tank of gas, every package of pens. All done exactly by the book for allowed travel.

The part of the team on per diem had a great time and only ended up paying for their hotels.

The boss wasn’t sure…

My boss at the time had been with the company for more than 40 years and when questioned on why the travel costs had been so high on that project had been so high.

His response was “some dumb person in accounting thought it was more important we follow a guideline in a book instead of doing it the same for everyone.” He also said ” [He was] willing to run the experiment as many times as as it took to make accounting understand it costs more this way.”

Our corporate policy is still a preference for expenses over per diem, but I have never been on a project that mixed the two since.

Geez! That was a clever way for employees to work together to make sure everyone got to enjoy the trip equally.

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this story.

This user has already come across similar stories.

This user likes the boss!

This user shares some additional information.

This user shares what they would have done if they were on a job like that!

This user tells a fascinating story about a guy he once travelled with!

This was a very enjoyable story!

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