Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

I found out about a worker getting fired because of this at one of the big 4 consulting firms. They used SAP Concur[0] software for travel & expense management and the machine learning algorithm flagged an irregularity in a recent expense reimbursement. But she wasn't actually fired for that one bad expense. What happened was that the SAP Concur raised management's suspicions which prompted the human accountants to go back into the old archives of T&E submissions from 5 years ago before SAP Concur was installed. They manually looked at her past reimbursements and discovered a long history of fraudulent claims. (E.g. incorrect hotel amounts.)

After the investigation, she was promptly fired without severance and also lost her flexible medical benefits (worth at least $10k).

Fraudulent expenses are no joke. Consulting companies are very sensitive about it because many consultants' expenses are included in the invoices and directly passed onto the clients. If you let clients discover a fraudulent expense instead of your internal auditing team finding it first, it is extremely embarrassing and taints all your other invoices. Integrity has to be maintained and you don't want clients questioning all the other billable hours and expenses.

[0] https://www.concur.com/

There was the old "raincoat expense report" urban legend back when I was in Big 4.

Consultant left raincoat on subway while traveling for business and ran replacement cost through on expense report. Admin rejected the expense.

Consultant submitted second expense report with exact same total without the raincoat expense line item and the cost just absorbed into the other untraceable per diem and incidental categories. "Find the raincoat now" as a comment.

Interesting story. :)

I think businesses can he really hard on fraud without being hard on what constitutes a valid expense.

I wonder how expensive that raincoat was that the person thought it needed to be its own line item on the expense. That's normally what the incidental expenses line is for, so this is just a story of someone who filled out his expense report incorrectly, got it rejected, and then filled it out correctly.

A good raincoat is pretty expensive. At least $200. So the guy submits an expense report with a $200 line item, gets rejected and splits the $200 into probably 7 or 8 incidentals which usually have a $25 limit, probably on different expense reports.

I'd take a double take at a $200 line item for an emergency raincoat to replace one that I lost on a trip. I'm not asking the guy to get a plastic poncho for his business meeting, but he doesn't need to get it at the Gucchi store.

Reminds me of a time I worked in a company that reimbursed us for coffee expenses on business travels. In their system, I had to itemize every receipt, so my expense report ended up being 50% made of morning espressos. The secretary handling expenses came back to me pretty annoyed and told me that next time, I should buy a pre-paid Starbucks card instead.

Similar experience at an employer where I was grateful to be travelling on their dime.

Took the bus and metro home from the airport - $3 claim rejected because I didn’t get a transfer as proof (which wasn’t needed to ride on this trip).

Yet if I drove, I could have claimed 50 cents a km or something, no proof required.

I've heard about "hide the hat" years ago––you lose your hat on a business trip and have to find some other way to expense it.

Wait, why should she lose her flexible medical benefits? Shouldn't recovery of the expense fraud be a separate legal process from taking of personal medical accounts?

Why do we connect medical benefits to employers?

Good question. It's a very strange method of motivation or coercion that we've all just kind of accepted into our lives, and we feel lucky to even have that.

Well all of us in the US, anyway. For some reason it doesn't work that way in most places on earth.

Medical job-lock is a real thing that happens, and most of us just discount the possibility completely until an unexpected problem crops up. AMHIK. Everyone be grateful for your health while you can, and plan for the future.

>Wait, why should she lose her flexible medical benefits?

Because it was one of those "healthcare savings flex accounts" where the company puts in "virtual dollars" to pay for some types of health care. Unlike unused vacation days that requires payout on the last paycheck by law, or a 401k account, this type of "flex account" is really a convenient accounting category that's administered purely by corporate discretion.

If the employee gets fired for just cause, the company decided it didn't want to let him/her walk away with the flex account. For the retirees that left on good terms, they do. It's just the way they did things. I think the idea is that the the ex-employee is now viewed as a criminal so the company feels justified in withdrawing discretionary benefits.

The regular type of employee health insurance that one could extend with Obamacare or COBRA was a separate thing.

(Ninja edit to reply below: it was not an FSA or "cafeteria" plan that deducted real dollars from the employee's paycheck. It was literally "virtual dollars" that the company allocated to the employee. But the virtual money turned into real money when the retiree used it to pay Medicare premiums. If there's an industry-wide jargon for this type of virtual bank account for healthcare that the employee never directly contributed to, I don't know what it is.)

Maybe you're talking about a different kind of account, but FSA dollars come out of the employee's own paycheck.

Sounds like they're referring to an HRA account[1][2]. It's a fully employer-funded, employer-owned, and employer-controlled reimbursement account. It's similar in function to an HSA account, but it doesn't actually belong to the employee and doesn't follow the employee when they're terminated. My employer offers both HRA and HSA based high deductible plans, as well as a PPO plan. The HRA plan is definitely the best plan on paper, especially since the unused HRA funds rollover[3], but a huge caveat being that you lose any HRA balance that you've accumulated over time if you ever leave or get terminated, since it doesn't actually belong to you.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hra.asp

[2] http://www.aetna.com/producer/aetnalink/2009-4q/natlink_hra_...

[3] Employers have significant leeway over how the HRA is structured, what it will cover, whether you have to use any FSA funds you have beforehand, whether unused balances will rollover or reset next year, etc. My employer happens to have a really good HRA structure, including rollover balances and using HRA funds before FSA funds.

FSA dollars come out of your own paycheck, but any unspent dollars revert to your employer when your employment terminates.

On the other hand, if you save $2500/yr in your FSA, spend it in one month after only after a little over $200 has been deducted from your paycheck, then quit, you just got an extra $2300 out of your employer you didn't pay for, so it goes both ways.

HRA - Health Reimbursement Arrangement, perhaps. They are entirely funded by the employer and do not involve paycheck deductions like an FSA or HSA would.

Why are our healthcare benefits so convoluted? Not being able to take the benefit with you away from an employer is a major negative that most people I'm guessing won't calculate in up front - at least it muddies the compensation question and comparisons to other employers.

Employer-related healthcare is largely exempt from taxes.

Many would suggest it's because multi-billion dollar industries (insurance, medical administration, tax, accounting) are partially dependent upon its enormous complexity for their existence. Or, perhaps because the lobbying of a few said billion dollar industries is more persuasive ($$$) to our legislators than the occasional rant from a common citizen.

Or maybe... it's because playing the game is advantageous to those who know how to play. "To the victor belong the spoils."

>Why do we connect medical benefits to employers?

It could arguably be traced back to the war time rationing of WWII:

>To combat inflation, the 1942 Stabilization Act was passed. Designed to limit employers' freedom to raise wages and thus to compete on the basis of pay for scarce workers, the actual result of the act was that employers began to offer health benefits as incentives instead.

[0] https://www.griffinbenefits.com/employeebenefitsblog/history...

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-ob...

Ironically that is probably a contributing factor for the lack of socialized healthcare in the US. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

Almost certainly. And then post-WWII, good medical benefit plans got enshrined in a lot of collective bargaining agreements and became pretty much the standard for large employers generally. At which part, taking them away is going to be very difficult.

A lot of expense procedures are fuzzy for a reason (no experiences with consulting companies).

Fraudulent expenses are the first and easiest way on the manager level / c-level to check if you want to get rid of someone. If everything is ok you need to look somewhere else.

> incorrect hotel amounts

What does this mean?

Amount claimed on expense report != amount paid to hotel.

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