Sometimes even well meaning employees get in trouble.

What would you do if you were told to submit a mileage claim form at work a certain way, but you knew that didn’t make sense for your specific situation?

Would you comply with the company policy, or would you do it your way which would actually save the company money?

In today’s story, one employee decides to go against the company policy, but when finance gets upset, she changes her mind.

Let’s read all the details.

I have to claim mileage from the office, not home? Okay….

I used to be sent out on training a few times a year and I could claim mileage at a set rate per mile.

At the time, most people working at this place lived in a town 5 miles North of the office and training tended to be in a large city about 60 miles South of the office.

At the time I lived halfway between the office and the city – so 30 miles South of the office, 30 miles North of the city where training was, so I was only claiming 60 miles expenses for every trip (home-city-home) rather than 120 miles (office-city-office).

Finance doesn’t really seem to understand how to save the company money.

So finance went on a cost-saving drive and announced that we had to claim mileage office-city-office, with their reasoning being that the majority of staff who lived 5 miles North would have been paying for their own fuel to get to the office so they shouldn’t be claiming those extra 5 miles x 2 on a training day.

I understood the reasoning for it, but assumed that as I was so far South, they’d still accept the 60 mile claim from me.

Boy was I wrong, and I was completely reamed out the next time I put in a claim.

Despite pointing out I was saving them money, I was accused of trying to defraud the company. I was told to redo my claim sheet and that they wouldn’t put a formal warning on my employee file this time…..

Her boss’s boss was a lot smarter than finance.

So instead of taking it higher – I mean I was now being paid double in mileage AND saving 60 miles of fuel on not driving to the office on training days – I complied.

A few months later my boss wasn’t in so I had to get her boss to sign my travel expenses.

He asked why I was claiming office-city-office when I lived so much closer.

I explained what had happened and he was mad, but signed it and told me he’d take it to finance for me as he was heading that way…..

This new policy makes more sense.

A policy amendment was emailed out to all staff later that day, stating that on training days we were to claim either home-city-home or office-city-office – whichever was the shorter.

Ah well. The extra money was nice when I got it!

The finance department certainly wasn’t doing their calculations correctly to make such a huge error in judgement.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person was in a similar situation.

Here’s another similar story.

This person never had the opportunity to take full advantage of a similar policy.

Apparently, a lot of companies have this same policy.

This story proves that not everyone has common sense.

Like we didn’t already know that.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.