Running a student club means juggling budgets, paperwork, and a lot of trust in the system.

So when one student leader submitted receipts for a $1,021 event and was reimbursed over $10,000 instead, she repeatedly tried to fix the mistake — only to be told there wasn’t one.

Suddenly a decimal point turned into a moral dilemma.

Keep reading for the full story.

My university told me to steal $9000 from them… so I did

This story is back from when I was attending university several years ago, pre-pandemic.

I was the president of a school club.

We had good attendance but limited interest in leadership positions.

I think this was largely due to being an minority organization, and the university lists all university org officers on their website for anyone with internet access to see.

So this student was forced to wear a lot of hats.

But anyway, that meant I was the only acting officer of this club, making me the secretary and treasurer also.

The other “officers” were actually previous club presidents who had graduated.

You just needed three student ID numbers to remain an active club.

I had planned a large ice cream social that went great.

One of these hats was event planning, but she ended up having to front the cost of a large catering bill.

I rented a ballroom on campus (free for student orgs), had ice cream catering, a live band, and almost 100 students in attendance.

It was a great way to begin the school year.

Anyway, it all cost something like $1,021.17 (not the actual amount, but something like that).

There were two methods to pay for this kind of thing: petition in advance for university funds or pay it yourself and submit a reimbursement after the fact.

She didn’t exactly trust the school to pay on time, so she decided she would just try and save face.

In the past, the school had taken six months to pay a vendor I used, and it was a stressful experience.

I wanted them to be paid, and I felt terrible having to just keep saying, “The university is working on it,” and going to the student org finance office twice a week to ask them about it for months.

So I figured I’d take the hit and wait for the funds myself.

Actually getting the reimbursement wouldn’t be easy.

I could sweat it out on student loans and get the band and caterer paid in a timely fashion.

There’s a bunch of compliance paperwork to fill out. You have to submit itemized receipts, etc., etc.

Long story short, it’s a process. But I got it all filed, and I waited.

About four months later, I got an email prompting me of an activity in the student org finance portal to approve a direct deposit to my account. You have to confirm the amount.

But when she took a look, she couldn’t believe what she saw.

I wish I’d been drinking water because I would have spat it out dramatically, but the amount was for $10,211.70.

They had clearly just misplaced the decimal point.

I could “accept” or “comment” on it, so I wrote that the amount should have been $1,021.17.

The school immediately started gaslighting her.

In an hour, I got a response back along the lines of, “Yes, the amount is $10,211.70.”

…so I responded, “No, it should be $1,021.17.”

And the response was that she “couldn’t find an issue.”

Now look, I’m terribly dyslexic, so I was genuinely thinking maybe I was misreading it and causing her to be confused.

So she double- and triple-checked her work.

Maybe, for who knows why, the computer put three numbers after the decimal, so I was reading $1,021.170 and thinking I saw $10,211.70 or something.

I had a friend look at it, and she confirmed I was, in fact, reading it correctly.

But hey, maybe the lady in the finance office was also dyslexic, or overworked, or couldn’t care less to actually look.

So she decided she needed to try one last time to make this right.

Whatever the case, I can explain myself better in person, so I walked down to the office. I was a regular at this point.

There was hardly ever a line because nearly everything is done online.

So I went up to the desk and said there had been a mistake on a reimbursement request for a club event.

I was told to have a seat and that she would chat with me in a moment.

So I waited for about half an hour while she sat on her iPhone at the desk.

Then she called me up.

The university continues to double down that there was no error.

I explained I was over-reimbursed, and she said, “Look, as I’ve told you, there’s nothing wrong.”

So I said, “But it’s off by a decimal place.”

She kind of just sighed and said she could deny the reimbursement or I could accept it and leave.

She seemed to be getting very upset with me, probably because I was constantly asking her the previous year about the payment for that vendor.

Finally, all the student could do was give up and accept the gross overpayment.

I said I would accept it and left.

When you “accept,” you can make a comment, so I basically typed in the comment box that I tried to remedy the situation and was told there was no issue repeatedly, over chat and in person, and then was threatened to not be reimbursed at all.

But not without building out a robust paper trail.

I took screenshots of all the messages in case I had to defend myself.

After a few business days, the money was direct deposited into my bank account the university has on file for tuition and student loans.

I let it sit there for a couple of years while I was a student, expecting them to find the error and demand the money back.

Eventually, she found a good cause for the money.

When I was getting close to graduating and that never happened, I gave the money to a member in my club whose parents stopped paying his tuition.

They pulled funds past the deadline for federal student loans and obviously wouldn’t co-sign for private loans.

She starts to dig into how the school could make such an error.

Interestingly enough, for any events over $15k, you had to file invoices in advance and have it pre-approved.

Anything under that they recommend you do this, but you can be reimbursed with proper receipts and paperwork.

I think that’s why it didn’t raise any alarms in the computer system. At least that’s all I can reason.

Even years later, she still holds onto the guilt.

It kind of haunts me to this day that I might randomly owe $9k at some point.

And I just don’t understand what I was saying wrong that she couldn’t understand me.

I worry I should have gone to her supervisor. But I was 19, so I just did as I was told.

This is a lot for any 19 year old to deal with.

What did Reddit think?

Believe it or not, these kinds of mistakes are actually fairly commonplace.

At least this student was able to do some good with the money.

The robust paper trail should help out this student if there’s trouble down the road.

Perhaps the office was secretly signing off on this “mistake.”

This student tried to do her due diligence, but the university only doubled down.

Sounds like this malicious compliance paid handsomely!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.