Whose Money Is It?

Last night, while sitting at a desk in the faculty office of the technical institute, I listened to full-time faculty discuss what they should put on expense reports to claim as reimbursable items. While they debated writing down mileage driven to/from work and foodstuff purchased for personal use in meetings/classrooms, I thought about the expense reports I had submitted or approved while working for other companies.

In the act of performing your job duties, what is a reasonable expense for your job (or any job, if there are such things as universal duties) versus what are expenses that go above and beyond reasonable expectations?

From my experience, I suspect some people view companies as cash cows and the employees are allowed to feed off the company until the company says "no." Other people view companies they work for as if they're the owners and they take care not to syphon cash from a company so the company has the opportunity to use its money for dividends to stockholders, rewards to employees, community development, stock repurchase and/or increase in research and development.

Ultimately, approval of an expense report rests on the shoulders of the supervisory/management job holders, no matter whether the organization is public or private, because the supervisors and managers are the caretakers of an organization (or should be).

I am not you. I don't know what motivates you to get up in the morning and find something to eat. I don't know if you have more money than you need but not more than you want (or think you need). I don't know if you struggle to feed a family with 10 children. I am like you, though, in that I'm a human living on this planet. I know what humans are capable of, from the grandest dreams to the vilest deeds - people will do whatever it takes to get what they think they need.

I don't expect humans to constantly make altruistic decisions or think conscientiously. Too many of us (and I include me here, of course) walk through the day on autopilot, having thoughts without thinking. We have our rutted paths that we take in comfort, or if we don't we seek them. This is not just human nature, it's life itself that optimizes energy output in order to minimize energy input (or vice versa, I suppose).

So, when you sit down to fill out an expense report, are you "taking care of number one" and getting all the money a company will give you, or are you viewing a company and its money as representative of a group of humans of which we're all a part, making sure that the money you don't try to claim is being spent by the company in ways that are beneficial to the whole (as opposed to hoarded by a few)?

A company is just an entity, a corpus without a body. For the most part, you can find out what the company is made of and how its inputs and outputs work. Sometimes you have to ask to get more information but most companies will share information with you if you can easily prove your intent is to find out and support the company's investment goals. The technical institute for which I provide temporary services has public documents that allow me to trace its investments - I can comfortably say the institute has satisfied my desire to see them support the local and regional communities so I am interested in making sure they have the money to continue this support, including careful scrutiny of expense reports.

A company that simply builds cash reserves with no other goal than to protect itself has, in my opinion, little chance of being protected by its caretakers - the supervisors and management - who hold the spigot of the flow of company cash. Government entities and the companies contracted to work for them are often encouraged to overspend so that budgets do not get decreased the next year, thus pushing people in the public sector to approve excessive expense reports when yearly expenditures have been too lean. People voice their opinions and demonstrate habits in many ways - the silent expense report approval process is one of them.

The wise person keeps a finger on the pulse of the company s/he works for, including what people are saying about expense reports. If many people are padding their expense reports and getting them approved up the management chain, it says a lot about the company and the people who work for it. I've worked for companies where the president/CEO reviewed expense reports down to the level of pencil purchases - that's a bad sign of both mistrust and poor cash flow, especially for a company with more than a few hundred employees. On the other hand, I've worked for companies where the monetary approval levels were mere guidelines and large purchases were approved with hardly a glance because people were moving in and out of jobs so fast during periods of quick company expansion that no one worried about repercussions/reprimands. In both cases, the actions spoke volumes about the companies' conditions and the employees who worked there.

What are expense reports saying about your workplace? What are your expense report requests saying about you? I guess it depends on whose money you think it is and how much you want/need to support your habits.

After writing this blog entry, I don't feel good; however, it reflects how I felt last night after hearing some of the requests and assumptions about what one person could put on an expense report. I still have a knot in my stomach and don't believe I can look one person in the eye again. But I'm going to try to see eye-to-eye so I can keep a line of communication open with that person and hope to get that person to see the world as a group of us. When we take from anyone or anything, there are consequences that go beyond the immediate, that go outside the moments in which we live. The pebbles we drop make waves that live into the next moment for us and others - live your life as if you're the pebble, the waves, the next moments and the others.