Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time secretary to deal with the bureaucracy. Everything we expensed required a paper trail. $50 lobster dinner on credit? No problem getting reimbursed. $3 hotdog with no receipt? Brace yourself for hours of paperwork.

This idiotic policy pressured us to spend more in pricey restaurants and avoid cheaper street vendors (Try explaining to a thai street vendor that the receipt has to have your name on it). Similarly, it was easier to claim a $50 cab ride than a $5 subway fare. Add in the cost of paying people to scrutinize our every receipt and I'm sure the University tripled the cost of conference trips. Success? Absolutely, at least for the sleazy admin who tripled the staff reporting to him, likely by claiming students couldn't be trusted to keep costs down.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it illustrates my point: Treating people as dishonest by default carries a heavy price, payable in bureaucrat salaries.

they started wanting boarding passes to reimburse flights at my school. Right around the time when you could start going through airports without a paper boarding pass. And people at gates would constantly take the paper boarding pass from you when you boarded.

Or that one time I had to provide the group photo from a conference as proof that I attended so they would reimburse me for registration. I might have flown to San Diego just to have a vacation, not attend the conference...

The easy solution for that is a stipend and receipts when you go over the cost for a few defined scenarios (for example, $60 to get to the airport, $20 a meal). If you are a cheap bastard, you make a few bucks. If it took three train trips and a taxi to get to the airport, keep the receipts.

The bureaucrats feared exactly the result of what you propse: That people would spend more than they eat and pocket the difference.

The old honor method was to add up what you spent on food and claim it as "per diem". The maximum was far more than you actually needed most places (Note: There's a big difference in food costs between, for example, Geneva and Bangkok). The new method required receipts with your name on them for everything.

> The bureaucrats feared exactly the result of what you propse: That people would spend more than they eat and pocket the difference.

And yet, allowing exactly that is the easy, rational way to cap costs.

Sorry if its a little OT, but I actually have this question: Is it normal for grad students to get reimbursed by their institution for conference travel?

Polices tend to be lab and department specific. Most everyone I know if reimbursed for flights and hotels (though they are typically required to apply for internal travel grants that exist for this purpose). Food reimbursement varies from lab to lab.

In my experience, in the US, it is normal to reimburse physics graduate students. I won't say how many of us there were to a room at times, but we were reimbursed....

CS PhD here: In our field, yes.

In my department, typically each student has a finite amount allocated for conference travel. After that, you either apply for travel grants, or (commonly) your supervisor will probably have access to extra funding, but it's still a finite resource.

Nobody would go to a conference if they had to pay their own way because nobody's paid enough to be able to, quite frankly.

It's not quite this bad where I am, but it's definitely heading in that direction. We've just had a new expenses system implemented, and it's obviously a nightmare compared to the old one, which was just a form you staple receipts to.

Any university where admin staff outnumber teaching/research staff is doing something wrong in my opinion. A certain amount of administration is obviously essential and invaluable, but there's a limit...

They should be using http://expensebot.com/

You should be aware that any kind of expense software used by a university would have to scale up to thousands of users and would, of course, need to be totally and utterly obfuscated. If any old category theorist or quantum physicist can figure it out it would result in pandemonium!

Peoplesoft... Now there's a real university expense reporting platform. Whatever you do, don't go into expense reports under the main menu. That will corrupt your account and cause you to cease being paid. Change your role from student, employee, or faculty to petitioning_supplicant34, go into the cost reporting section, flip the null flag, then go into history and enter your expenses under category T311802, unless it's Tuesday or a prime numbered day of the Julian calendar. If that doesn't work and it's not a Tuesday or prime Julian date, request an update from Pam in accounts, who will be on vacation until the next solstice.

You should try the Defense Travel System. After submitting my itinerary once, probably the 5th time I'd taken the exact same quarterly trip, using the exact same system, my ticketing never came through. I finally realized it and called one of the travel people. He said "Once you hit submit, you have to go back and check on this other page, in about an hour, to make sure it actually went through, otherwise you have to resubmit."

Wat? This is in production? On a financial system?

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