Expensing: When, where, and how bad was it

Due Diligence trip for PE target in Mexico City - company didn't have wifi and the partner didn't set up the corporate phones properly so we had to use my phone's wifi hotspot for internet for the week - racked up $22k in international phone data charges for the week in Mexico City.

I try my hardest to expense as little as possible. I've never seen someone get fired for using their corporate amex too much. I only use my corporate card for team building experiences (golf outings, baseball games, etc.).

Booze and hotpants

One time I expensed a Hertz car for 3 months... Bill was over 7k.

Here was the setup: had a project outside of NYC and I was given a budget of 700 bucks per week for the Hertz rental alone and this was for five days of the week [Monday to Friday], and so if you added the monthly fees it was over 2.4k per month.. so I decided to take a Hertz long-term rental discount... So I took the car out for a whole three months and did some epic weekend trips for free. The tolls, gas, and insurance were all paid for... the only issue was parking, but that turned out to be okay since there is legal free parking in Manhattan in some areas... I remember showing my boss a picture of me on the Jersey shore on a Saturday with the car (by chance) in the photo and he was like "Didn't know you had a car in the city, how is that going?" .... luckily I covered it up with a great excuse on where I got the car. It was a burgundy Toyota Camry, which is quintessentially Hertz Manhattan...

I have a few other stories... one that included a $1.5k award dinner that I spun as a "business development opportunity." I wrote 5,000 words on the speakers at the dinner and why attending in person was the only opportunity to get the business... Turned out to be awesome, gained zero knowledge but they did seat me with some smoke shows... Naturally, it was awesome.

Love the old Big 4 expense policies. I had an out of town engagement on a middle-of-nowhere client about 30 min from a nice B&B area. I worked a lot for those two weeks but the family spent my per diem and vacationed essentially on the firm's dime.

Two years ago I expensed an $8K antique gold-tipped walking stick as a 50th birthday present for a client. Actually not as bizarre as it sounds; the stick had belonged to a former president of client's home country. Client is a demi-billlionaire and generous to a fault, but this was the only present he got for this milestone birthday! Reimbursed by my bosses with a big attaboy, since they'd authorized up to $25K.

In the entertainment line, the most dubious expense I've ever submitted was a dinner at the late lamented Windows on the World. It quickly became apparent there was no prospect of business with the guest, so we launched a raid on the wine cellar. A few months later, somebody else raided and the whole place was vaporized.

$16k. XS, Vegas.

Anyone from Citi, Houston?

There's a great story from last year's recruiting.

Two $30k closing dinners at Per Se a month apart and got a free flight to Vegas out of it.

c. EUR1k in high-end italian accessories for the team as "client research". Got reamed out by my MD but still worth it. :'-D!

At my old firm I was based in London but only had scandinavian clients, mostly in Norway so would travel there about twice a month. There is one single expense however everyone at the firm heard stories about how expensive everything in Norway is, especially food. This meant that any dinner/drinks I went to I basically had free range to choose whatever I wanted and not care about price at all because everyone just assumed oh yeah typical expensive Norway. Was a pretty sweet set up.

I know several people who have been fired for far less. Trying to make money off of expenses when we're already getting paid obscene amounts of money is just foolish.

Entertainment and "marketing" is a different story. Personally, $3.5k bar tab.

At my previous fund, I traveled a lot internationally so I requested an unlocked blackberry so I could put in a local sim and use phone / data as I pleased. For some reason, IT wouldn't and kept saying we had negotiated great international rates with our provider so I should use my phone as usual and not worry about cost. Had 3 or 4 months of successive 5 - 10k bills before they finally relented and gave me an unlocked phone.

Similar to above, I was living in New England and had to rent cars every week to do onsite at regional clients. It turned out that it was cheaper to just rent cars monthly, at a cost of $1900 per month with the underage driver fee. It was worth it to me not to have to go to the rental car station each week.

I was new to the Northeast at the time so would go on some sort of trip every weekend with those cars--Cape Cod, Maine, Vermont, even shuttled around my rugby club to some matches in that thing too. It was even better than owning a car because you could trash it and just drop it off each month in exchange for a shiny new one. I would just throw my coffee cups into the back seat when I was done with them because I cared so little. I self-imposed a rule that I would pay for gas used on weekends though, which somehow made it more morally tolerable at the time.

I would also frequently buy dinner in client cities and then drive home to eat it. For example, I could be in Vermont with a colleague and we'd call ahead to some restaurant on I-95, swoop in and pick up some Atlantic salmon and scallop dish for the evening. That saved mad money on grocery bills, but then again if you're going to keep me at a clients site until 7 and then expect me to drive an hour home I think a dinner is an acceptable expense. It was always a struggle waiting to cross state lines before I could buy my morning coffee.