It’s funny when a manager thinks they are being smart, but the opposite is true.

Check out how this worker took advantage of a ridiculous new policy.

You’re going to save money by making it harder to file expense reports? Game on!

At my previous employer, I had to attend a lot of meetings around town and also go to a few events out-of-county. When I started, they had a pretty flexible policy where you could accept a monthly allowance of about $40 to cover your mileage, or, if you were taking a lot of trips, you could submit expense reports and get the standard IRS allowable mileage reimbursement.

I hate expense reports, so most of the time just took the $40 and called it even, despite the possibility that I might have made a few extra dollars by doing the longer expense report.

Then a manager thought they could take advantage of the workers.

New HR manager is hired and she decided it would save a bunch of money if we cut out the monthly allowance for the sales team and made us file for expenses for every trip. Again, since I hate expense reports, I usually just ate the cost and only filed for trips where I would receive $20 or more. New HR lady notices that a lot of us are just donating the value of trips under $20-ish, so she figures maybe we’ll start donating more if the expense report becomes more arduous.

Her brilliant idea: require extra documentation, like printing a Google Map for each trip and adding extra details to each report. This means she needed to hire an extra clerk to manage all this extra paperwork. But then she thought she’d be even more clever and start rejecting our reports if we didn’t print a map for getting to the destination and a separate one for the return trip. Wow—ok, game on!

I started using a very old map website, like Mapquest and I would create one for every trip, even the 3-mile round trip to one of our other offices just up the road.

When life gives you lemons…

I saved a file for each of the regular visits so I could just pull them up and print one out. But even better—I didn’t just print the page with the map but the five or six pages (each way) that were filled with advertisements for gas stations, fast food, hotels, etc.

By using these, I could submit a report for $3 reimbursement in seconds, but it meant printing about 10-15 pages each time. And yes, they ended up averaging more like $60 a month in reimbursement to me after that. And they added another part-timer to help sort and file all the paperwork.

I’d like to say I outlived this idiot at the company, but sad to say she’s still there, and still costing them tons of money in wasted time and resources, meanwhile killing the culture and any morale we ever created. But at least I made her life miserable.

My parting gift was to share my Mapquest files with everyone on the sales team so they could bury her in paperwork.

Here is what people are saying.

LOL exactly. It’s silly.

I think you’re overthinking this.

Expensive in so many ways.

Even if she was, she should know this makes no sense.

It could have been a movement. Oh well.

Nice job, Einstein.

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