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Comment by unlikelytomato | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively, companies will just go back to corporate cards with very strict vendor rules. When vendor rules are not enough, they will go back to extremely tight per diem and simply not care of the expense was strictly real or not. I can't see any advantage to using a whole new currency and exchange that every vendor in the world is now going to have to support for this to be useful vs these simple measures.

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> these simple measures

I'm not sure either, it's mostly a guess I guess, more than a prediction. But if companies/governments can get more tracking, usually that's the way they move.

So if the companies that are complaining in the article implements your simple measures, does that mean the fraud problem they're talking about have been solved already? That begs the question, why aren't they just doing that then?

Not solved but constrained. If I post you per diem. I no longer have to worry about if what you spend it on is legit or not

The problem isn't "spending above/below per diem" as I understand the article. The problem is that whatever spending is happening, might be fake, that's why they're complaining about "faking expense receipts".

So it does seem like the companies themselves do worry about if what you spend it on is legit or not, it's almost the entire purpose of the article unless I misunderstand something?

In my experience, this form of expense management is a relatively new development. Not so long ago, I had a company linked corporate card. Credit card transactions are already labeled with the type of purchase. You have to submit a report that corresponds to the actual charged amount. Additionally, they get all the bills with their hotel partner to cross reference the transactions with the credit card and the submitted expense. Flights etc worked the same way. Those are now additionally tracked in the company travel relationship portals which accomplish the block chain without the block chain. None of this requires a global immutable currency ledger or anything like that to accomplish their goal: just get some reasonable transaction validation long enough to process the expense then never look at it past an audit. Later, they also made people eat from the same hotel and negate the issue for meal expenses. It's just not a technology problem. If it were, they would just demand more granularity from the credit card company and the employee and reject things out of policy.

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