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Comment by doughj3 | Hacker News Reader

> Oops, now your boss wants to know why you just paid for your groceries on the business credit card and you have to explain that you cloned your business credit card and there was a mistake!!

I'm not sure how every corporate card works, but I have accidentally made purchases on a Corporate Amex before and it's not a problem. I just pay that part off myself and don't mark it to be expensed. Don't see this as a problem.

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OTOH in other companies you might be in serious hot water. Or, if you work for the government, potentially going to jail for putting personal expenses on a government card.

This is a bit hyperbolic - mistakes like this happen all the time and I have serious doubts you'd ever go to jail or even lose a job over something like this, as long as you get it corrected once you recognize the problem. The issue in my mind is that the hassle of correcting this kind of error quickly negates any convenience you'd have gotten from using the card in the first place.

In cases like that it would be unwise to put your company card on this card. You'd now be carrying two cards. In the case of having to carry two cards, it still fixes my George Costanza wallet.

I had a purchasing card when I worked for a state university. They monitored the transactions on the card extremely closely since it was tied to state money and federal grant money. If I had mistakenly charged a personal expense on it, I would have had to contact a couple different administrators, explain the mistake, and get the transaction refunded (and then pay for the expense myself). It would have been a bureaucratic pain, but I would not have gotten in trouble for it, certainly not jail.

I know mistakes happen and things do get charged to the wrong card, but can you imagine your boss being a happy bunny if he or she found out you've cloned the card?

At a minimum, cards should be issued to a specific person and immediately revoked when no longer authorized. If this infrastructure is in place, why should the employer care?

If it's not, then we're assuming a shared account, which increases the risk exposure for normal loss, theft, etc. by the number of people using that account. Can you afford to have your organization's payment ability severely hampered because a field rep got mugged?

Why does my boss need to know I cloned the card? I'm saying, mistakes like these already happen without cards being cloned, it won't be introducing a new problem. You don't need to say anything to your boss more than, "Sorry, I used the wrong card."

Many Amex cards look very similar, for instance. I and others I know have accidentally handed the corporate amex over instead of the personal one. I've also had the case where, a company (in this particular case, a rental car company) had saved my corporate card, and automatically billed that when I went for a personal purchased.

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