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Comment by master_crab | Hacker News Reader

There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.

Ehh. Neither of these are soft fraud. The former is outright law-breaking, the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.

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> the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.

This is the soft fraud mentality: If a company offers meal delivery for people who are working late who need to eat at the office and then people start staying late (without working) and then taking the food home to eat, that’s not consistent with the policies.

It was supposed to be a consolation if someone had to (or wanted to, as occurred with a lot of our people who liked to sleep in) stay late to work. It was getting used instead for people to avoid paying out of pocket for their own dinners even though they weren’t doing any more work.

Which is why we can’t have nice things: People see these policies as an opportunity to exploit them rather than use them as intended.

soft fraud mentality

This isn’t about fraud anymore. It’s about how suspiciously managers want to view their employees. That’s a separate issue (but not one directed at employees).

If a company says you have permission to spend money on something for a purpose, but employees are abusing that to spend money on something that clearly violates that stated purpose, that’s into fraud territory.

This is why I call it the soft fraud mentality: When people see some fraudulent spending and decide that it’s fine because they don’t think the policy is important.

Managers didn’t care. It didn’t come out of their budget.

It was the executives who couldn’t ignore all of the people hanging out in the common areas waiting for food to show up and then leaving with it all together, all at once. Then nothing changed after the emails reminding them of the purpose of the policy.

When you look at the large line item cost of daily food delivery and then notice it’s not being used as intended, it gets cut.

This might come as a bit of a surprise to you, but most (really all) employees are in it for money. So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning. That’s why you implement rules.

If you start trying to tease apart the motivations people have even if they are following those rules, you are going to end up more paranoid than Stalin.

> This might come as a bit of a surprise to you

> So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning.

I’m not “surprised” nor “astonished” nor do you need to be “concerned” for me. That’s unnecessarily condescending.

I’m simply explaining how these generous policies come to and end through abuse.

You are making a point in favor of these policies: Many will see an opportunity for abuse and take it, so employers become more strict.

I find your tone commendable, and I hope I can extend you the same courtesy of being respectful while disagreeing.

The idea that a company offering food in some capacity can be seen as generous is, at best, confusing and possibly naïve. A company does this because it expects such a policy will extract more work for less pay. There is no benevolence in the relationship between a company and an individual — only pure, raw self-interest.

In my opinion, the best solution is not to offer benefits at all, but simply to overpay everyone. That’s far more effective, since individuals then spend their own money as they choose, and thus take appropriate care of it.

> but most (really all) employees are in it for money

Yes, but some also have a moral conscience and were brought up to not take more than they need.

If you are not one of these types of people, then not taking complete over advantage of an offer like free meals probably seems like an alien concept.

I try to hire more people like this, it makes for a much stronger workforce when people are not all out to get whatever they can for themselves and look out for each others interests more.

This is disingenuous but soft-fraud is not a term I’d use for it. Fraud is a legal term. You either commit fraud or you do not. There is no “maybe” fraud—you comply with a policy or law or you don’t.

As you mentioned, setting policy that isn’t abused is hard. But abuse isn’t fraud—it’s abuse—and abuse is its own rabbit hole that covers a lot of these maladaptive behaviors you are describing.

Fraud is also used colloquially and it doesn't seem we're in a court of justice rn.

It’s called expense fraud.

I call the meal expense abuse “soft fraud” because people kind of know it’s fraud, but they think it’s small enough that it shouldn’t matter. Like the “eh that’s fine” commenter above: They acknowledged that it’s fraud, but also believe it’s fine because it’s not a major fraud.

If someone spends their employer’s money for personal benefit in a way that is not consistent with the policies, that is legally considered expense fraud.

There was a case local to me where someone had a company credit card and was authorized to use it for filling up the gas tank of the company vehicle. They started getting in the habit of filling up their personal vehicle’s gas tank with the card, believing that it wasn’t a big deal. Over the years their expenses weren’t matching the miles on the company vehicle and someone caught on. It went to court and the person was liable for fraud, even though the total dollar amount was low five figures IIRC. The employee tried to argue that they used the personal vehicle for work occasionally too, but personal mileage was expensed separately so using the card to fill up the whole tank was not consistent with policy.

I think people get in trouble when they start bending the rules of the expense policy thinking it’s no big deal. The late night meal policy confounds a lot of people because they project their own thoughts about what they think the policy should be, not what the policy actually is.

Are you saying the mentality is offensive? Or is there a business justification I am missing?

Note that employers do this as well. A classic one is a manager setting a deadline that requires extreme crunches by employees. They're not necessarily compensating anyone more for that. Are the managers within their rights? Technically. The employees could quit. But they're shaving hours, days, and years off of employees without paying for it.

It’s basic expense fraud.

If a company policy says you can expense meals when taking clients out, but sales people started expensing their lunches when eating alone, it’s clearly expense fraud. I think this is obvious to everyone.

Yet when engineers are allowed to expense meals when they’re working late and eating at the office, but people who are neither working late nor eating at the office start expensing their meals, that’s expense fraud.

These things are really not gray area. It seems more obvious when we talk about sales people abusing budgets, but there’s a blind spot when we start talking about engineers doing it.

Frankly this sort of thing should be ignored, if not explicitly encouraged, by the company.

Engineers are very highly paid. Many are paid more than $100/hr if you break it down. If a salaried engineer paid the equivalent of $100/hr stays late doing anything, expenses a $25 meal, and during the time they stay late you get the equivalent of 20 minutes of work out of them- including in intangibles like team bonding via just chatting with coworkers or chatting about some bug- then the company comes out ahead.

That you present the above as considered "expense fraud" is fundamentally a penny-wise, pound-foolish way to look at running a company. Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.

> Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.

Luckily that comes down to the policy of the individual company and is not enforced by law. I am personally happy to pay engineers more so they can buy this sort of thing themselves and we dont open the company to this sort of abuse. Then its a known cost and the engineers can decide from themselves if they want to spend that $30 on a meal or something else.

To give them enough money to buy that $30 meal as a personal expense, you need to pay them around $50 in marginal comp expenses.

It can be a win for both sides for the employees to work an extra 30-90 minutes and have some team bonding and to feel like they’re getting a good deal. (Source: I did this for years at a place that comp’d dinner if you worked more than 8 hours AND past 6 PM; we’d usually get more than half the team staying for the “free” food.)

I have found that the success of things like this depend greatly on so many factors such as office type, location, team moral, management style, individual personalities, even mean age etc.

I have worked in places where the exact opposite of what you describe happens. As OP says, people just stop working at 6 and just start reading reddit or scrolling their phones. No team bonding and chat because everyone is wiped out from a hard day. Just people hanging around, grabbing their food when it arrives, and leaving.

We too had more than half the team staying for the “free” food, but they definitely didnt do much work whilst they were there.

> It’s basic expense fraud.

I'm making the case that mandatory unpaid overtime is effectively wage theft. It is legal in the US because half of jobs there are "exempt" from the usual overtime protections. There's no ethical reason for that, just political ones.

At any rate, I think people who want to crack down on meal expenses out of a sense of justice should get at least as annoyed by employers taking advantage of their employees in technically allowed ways.

Good grief, no. They got an extra hour of productive (or semi-productive time; after 8 hours most people are, unsurprisingly, kind of worn down) out of us while waiting for dinner to arrive and a bit of team-building as we commiserate over whatever we're working on causing us to stay late over a meal. That more than offsets the cost of the food.

If an employee or team is not putting in the effort desired, that's a separate issue and there are other administrative processes for dealing with that.

Tragedy of the Commons is a real thing. The goto solution that most companies use is to remove all privileges for everyone. But really, this is a cultural issue. This is how company culture is lost when a company gets larger.

A better option is for leadership to enforce culture by reinforcing expectations and removing offending employees if need be to make sure that the culture remains intact. This is a time sync, without a doubt. For leadership to take this on it has to believe that the unmeasurable benefit of a good company culture outweighs the drag on leadership's efficiency.

Company culture is will always be actively eroded in any company and part of the job of leadership is to enforce culture so that it can be a defining factor in the company's success for as long as possible.

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