When your job requires you to drive a lot, the company will often provide a car that you can use as it is cheaper than renting one for each trip.

What would you do if your company decided to cancel all the company cars and required that you find other ways to travel?

That is what happened to the engineers in this story, so they read the travel policy and followed it perfectly.

Let’s see why that was a big problem for the company.

Company saves cost by taking away company cars.

About 6 years ago I worked for power supply company in the UK

I worked in a small project team that coordinated all the companies major infrastructure projects and the role required travel to meetings all over the country.

Wow, that is a lot of driving.

We’d average around 800miles a week in company miles over the year, depending on time of year and location of projects etc.

Some one in the finance department had reviewed our expense claims and calculated that over one quarter we’d not covered the required number of company miles to meet the companies policy on company cars for that one quarter with out looking at any other data.

That is a big loss.

We lost our company car entitlement and the company told us we had to return the the the fleet company at the end of their leases.

Malicious compliance activated.

As we were project engineers we had a very particular set of skills for knowing how to follow rules to the letter and how to do so in a manner that benefitted the company or project or individuals.

Usually if it benefitted the company it benefitted all involved.

This was not one of those occasions.

We pay benefit in kind tax on our company cars in the uk, the rules around this changes as and when the government feel like it.

That’s a smart move.

My team had all carefully chosen out cars to be zero cost to our selves by choosing cars that were below the allowance of £300 month so the remaining allowance covered the tax obligation.

We’d all be out of luck by the benefit in kind tax changes that year and were now paying tax.

So, for starters we reviewed the company car policy, and found the company had no way of stopping us handing our cars back with immediate affect, whilst the company was still responsible for the leases.

So, we all made arrangements for personal cars and handed our keys over at the next team meeting.

They used the company’s travel policy to their full advantage.

We’d also reviewed the company travel policy.

We started using hire cars and trains for travelling. (Trains and hire cars in the uk are not cheap) As non of us were willing to use our personal cars and claim the 50p per mile.

Usually we’d work a long day and book a bit of over time or lieu to drive to and from meetings with out staying over as we would prefer to be at home even if it meant getting home late.

That stopped with immediate effect.

We’d only work the mandated 7.5 hour day then stop book into a hotel and take full advantage of the £25 food and drink allowance for dinner.

Then work from home the following day as we’d been away from home the previous day, as per the policy.

This was very predicable.

After about 8 weeks, we were called into a meeting with our line manager and dept manager about our expenses.

Our expenses for the first month after the cars had been returned were more than they were for the previous 12 months combined.

Our line manager agreed that our expenses were inline with the policy otherwise he wouldn’t have signed them off.

The dept manager told us we were getting company cars back and he expected the expenses to return to previous levels.

We declined the “offer” of company cars and let management know we’d be adhering to the travel policy to the letter.

I bet that the finance department regretted their decision.

Read on to see what the people in the comments at Reddit think about this story.

Bean counters are important but not infallible.

Exactly right.

This person left a job because of something like this.

And I’m sure management thought it was a good thing.

This type of thing happens a lot.

The finance department should have thought this through.

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