UNUSUAL BUSINESS EXPENSES

You know how company reps turn in receipts for travel and expenses as part of their job? (* Well, you probably work for minimum wage, so you don’t, but there are people out there who do.) Here, from the website AccountingToday (* Catchy name!) are some of the “Interesting Expense Awards from Oversight Systems,” which develops software to check for these kind of things.
1. A sales rep expensed a sports bra from Lululemon as a “client gift.” The client and the sales rep went together to a yoga class, which was also expensed to the company.
2. One employee expensed $99,000 worth of Lenovo computers. He was using the corporate discount to buy computers at a steep discount and then sell them for a big profit.
3. One employee decided her eyelash extensions qualified as a business expense and charged the $69 purchase to her company.
4. A guy altered receipts to list his cigarette purchases as “fuel.”
5. One employee charged a $699 Traeger Grill as a business expense.
6. An employee at a medical technology company kept submitting the same doctored receipt for a parking lot that no longer existed.
7. An employee explained expensing a bottle of wine as a “snack” by saying, “I wanted to save the company money by not having wine at dinner.” Even though her receipts showed that she still had wine with her dinner.
8. One employee expensed several doomsday prepper books with titles like “Your Home Fallout Shelter: How to Ensure Your Family’s Health and Survival in a Nuclear Incident”; “Nuclear War Survival Skills”; and “The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat, and Store Your Most Vital Resource.”
* It was, in fact, Doomsday for that person’s job.
* Trust me, accountants listening to this list are rolling on the floor with laughter.
* Stupid expense account analysis software. I once got caught trying claim a sports bra, too.
* But I did get away with the eyelash extensions.
* We should be able to expense our coffee. Coffee is as integral to morning radio as traffic and weather.