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Comment by deeblering4 | Hacker News Reader

> For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis.

So... the payment system was a discord bot?

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Honestly having had to deal with the hell that is a purchasing request in large corporations I think I'd rather go with a discord bot than have to spend 6 months justifying why I need to purchase a $50 piece of software to do my job.

Similar. The best reimbursement system I’ve worked with was for a company that just automatically approved everything under a few thousand dollars (never states a hard threshold) based on individual professional judgement to spend funds to advance company goals. And they audited every purchase ever made when you went for partner.

It was both liberating and terrifying to have that much freedom. The audits weren’t widely available so it’s hard to know how effective this was, but it was pretty rare to hear about people not making partner because of it and they were super thorough about every charge, frequently asking for detail.

Yeah, but the next paragraph indicates disbursements included entire houses.

I mean, who wouldn't want that? Aside from that whole "embezzlement" issue.

I liked one of my old bosses for this. He'd notice a meeting with 5 engineers about licensing some software and would swoop in.

"How much is the license for this software?" Upon hearing an answer, "The company bills your time out at $250/hr - this meeting has cost us the licensing fee of this software. Next time, just buy it. If I have a problem with that, I'll change the policy then."

Enron, and now FTX, are the reason why that is like that.

Sometimes corporate greed is why systems are so hard.

My previous company had a very rigid repayment system and i swear it was designed to deny expenses.

Once i submitted an expense for $3.25 for a train and they wanted receipts. I didn't have one and they wanted me to sign an affidavit that i would not find the receipt and resubmit my expense.

This is for $3.25 and the amount of time spent trying to get my money back exceeded the expense amount.

The obvious common sense question should have been : If my plane landed in X, and the office is located at Y, how did i get there?

Somehow. That's not their business. But they don't want you claiming a train ticket, a bus ticket, and mileage all for the same trip.

Every seemingly stupid rule has an equally stupid person behind it.

It would be nice if we could just trust people, but there are a class of people who then abuse that trust. Systems are in place to thwart them at the expense of everyone else.

If you claimed all three of those, you would have to claim all three of them, at which point you would have claimed all three of them, and someone could easily see that.

Someone could easily see that if you have an actual reimbursement system in place.

If it's based on the honor system, I could claim the train ticket, then claim a bus ticket and say that the ticket was for something else, you were mistaken. Then claim mileage and say the bus ticket wasn't that trip, you made a mistake. Again, just like the train ticket.

So, yes, the claim needs to be backed by proof of trip or by a deliberate action on your part saying that you are claiming this right here on this date for this trip.

In your example you describe "something else". If there's "something else", then that "something else" is an allowable expense.

Lies are not an allowable expense.

Come on, these were professionals… they used slack.

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