> If the goal isn't actively set to help and streamline the process
In the reimbursements example, the goal shifted, by design. The environment moved from high-trust to low-trust as the department grew, and the aim moved from "keeping people happy" to "spending less money"/"not being taken advantage of". Not defending it -- I hate paperwork like this -- but it seems almost inevitable as groups of any kind grow large enough and you actually can't assume good faith anymore.
Over the long term, yes. However, universities like Buffalo might have some peculiarities. They are overall run by the state government, and professors/students/staff are state employees. In addition, the money that pays their salary often comes from the federal government (NSF, DOE, NIH) which comes with their own restrictions and regulations beyond typical accounting practices.
So things like reimbursements are handled by a university trying to implement a state government's interpretation of both granting agencies desires and federal and state laws/regulations.
My university seems to be going crazy with rules lately. My hypothesis is that the state, and by extension the university, wants to button down everything so as not draw attention of the federal government (given who is in charge). It's taking already stressed professors (funding cuts, etc) and piling on more stress.
The level of trust didn't change at all, Joann must have read every single receipt as she filled out the forms. A fraudulent or out-of-policy expense would've been noticed either way.
High-trust doesn't mean absolute trust. Hand me a pile of receipts and I'll figure it out (probably with leeway in your favor) is much higher trust than uploading receipt, categorizing, adding explanations for exceptions, etc. One feels reasonable and still dignified. The other feels adversarial and paternalistic.
Joanne probably had to field some "sorry, this can't be expensed" situations, and/or those were reduced because people knew another human was doing the work and they'd get called out, trying to game/abuse the system was less or just naturally discouraged. That was high trust, by both the employee and by Joanne.
With the employees needing to use Concur directly, there's a tendency, since there's a diversity in how each employee will handle the specifics, to try to "save money" by denying reimbursements for any random violation, making sure all i's were dotted and t's crossed. The automated system itself encourages this because it's so low effort to deny and send the expense form back, potentially wearing down the employe that they just give up. Joanne could avoid all that at scale because there was little/no diversity in how expenses were handled. If an i needed to be dotted, she could handle it, and she knew all the i's that needed to be dotted across all expense reports.
I currently have someone to handle my expense reports who sits in front of Concur for me! And that person routinely asks me for specific detail without me having to mess with Concur at all, things like "who was at this dinner you gave me a receipt for" or "I can't find the receipt for this company card charge".
This, the person nitpicking the Concur entries might as well have done Joanne's job and achieve two things at once. Compliance to concur and the regulatory compliance built into the concur process and not wasting everyone's time doing concur
I've seen adversarial approaches in small companies or even an individual boss and I've seen cooperative approaches in moderately large organizations.
The shift toward an adversarial approach in just about any organization is noticeable, in fact, in the US in the last 10-15 years but the US hasn't grown in size that much, large scale organizations existed much earlier.
I remember at a previous job I had to do a fair bit of business travel. The company had their own internal tool for filing expense reports.
I would do the typical thing of "take picture of receipt, upload receipt, specify how much it cost, etc.", and for the most part it was seemless and it would be sent to my bank account.
One time, I bought a box of Fiber One bars at a CVS Pharmacy and expensed that. I got a phone call from the billing department asking why I would expense something like that and I said something like "because I don't usually eat that healthy during business travel and I suspect you can guess the reason after that". They told me they would get back to me, and then I got an email telling me that they rejected the expense report and I would have to file it again to get the rest of my stuff reimbursed.
I can be a pretty petty dude, so I filed it again, completely unchanged, I get another phone call telling me to remove it, and this repeated two more times. Eventually I complained to my manager and he was able to get them to let me expense it and it all worked out.
I find it amusing, because the box of Fiber One bars was less than five bucks. I suspect all the time that they wasted of theirs and mine probably cost considerably more than the $5 would have saved from not covering it.
That is more likely a result of legal requirements. As a general rule any personal benefit you get counts as your income and is taxed accordingly. Expensing is not, instead counting as a business expense.
To avoid people just forming a personal company and declaring everything they spend a business expense and thus not taxed there are rules around what can be counted as a business expense.
If you instead want to take your salary in the form of Fiber One bars, but pay taxes on that spending in dollars, then your accounting department might have had fewer issues since they would not be mixing legally distinct costs and accidentally committing financial fraud.
Why is it a personal benefit? If I am onsite for 5-10 days, I am likely going to have 1-2 bars/day - especially if I am working a high-stress engagement where actually leaving the client site would have taken away my ability to execute to the required level of service.
At some point, policing what each employee eats and how they spend their maximum "per day/per diem" total allowance becomes a cost-drain.
I have been in orgs where some people were frugal and bought essentially groceries, so they could eat in their hotel room - some of that was dietary or health choices and restrictions. Eating restaurant food every single day for 3-meals/day is not a healthy choice (especially years ago when portion sizes were typically far too vast in some countries/regions). Then, in the same group - we had staff who would determine an average size meal - and then ensure that the tips they left would max-out to their daily maximum allowance, to "spread-the-wealth" so-to-speak.
Neither was fraudulent - we were allowed a daily max budget (it was not a per diem), we still had to submit receipts - heck, in our region if you wanted to spend your budget entirely on alcohol, there were (at the time) no red flags.
Of course it is a personal benefit, you are literally benefitting by not spending your own post-tax dollars. However, there are legal rules that allow categorizing certain such expenses and amounts as a cost of doing business even though the manifest benefit is purely “personal”.
These rules have tightened up since the days of company cars and company houses “expensing” employee cars and houses as a tax advantaged form of compensation.
The allocations you are provided and the manner in which you are allowed to spend them are generally considered “safe” from a accounting perspective. There is usually wiggle room above them if you are willing to more thoroughly document or finagle them, but that is extra accounting department cost to do things beyond the safe, well-trod legal path.
37 signals has a story about this, and the birth of policies & procedures that cost far more than the "crime" they're intended to prevent, because in your case it was $5 in granola bars, but that scenario will repeat itself for the rest of time, and extra resources will likely be dedicated to this "problem area". This seems inevitable as companies grow, and is one of the signals I use that it's close to my time to leave.
Didn't you have a specific per day expense budget? I think there is a department of labor guidance for local travel and a department of state guidance for international travel.
Usually, if your per day expense is less or equal to the guidance (where I work we do $90/day), no one cares. If you go above, you pay. The per day expense is for food. Alcohol cannot be claimed as an expense unless you are in sales.
Even in your short, simple comment I see 4? 5? (or more?) pieces of administrative policy that need to be policed, and then we need a process to handle these rules - and the edge cases (ex: what if I'm travelling with someone in sales but I'm the senior employee and we take a client out for dinner? only sales can expense alcohol but typically the most senior employee must pay), and the resubmission process, and the approve of exceptions process, and on it goes...
This maybe for travel expenses but it's the same story for so many things
1. Start with a mostly manual, people labor based, system that works well (handing Joann receipts)
2. It begins to not cost-scale well with growth (department size increases) or a salesmen comes around with a service that offers to do the same thing for less (Concur) or both
3. The company switches to reduce costs
4. The new service is cheaper partly because it offloads work onto employees (filling out travel expense forms) and by cheaping out on the experience (not caring that the forms are not easy to understand and the system is annoying to use)
5. Employees now have to spend time doing a task they never did and their experience is worse
And it stays in this state forever because the observable costs (service cost vs some number of Joann's) are less. The fact that expensive employees (A department full of Phd's) are now wasting time and being annoyed by this system are not seen. The hours used to fill out those forms and lost productivity due to anger are never accounted for. Also the higher ups are detached because they still have their own personal Joann's taking care of everything.
I didn't even put in my last hotel bill, because my time was worth more to me than navigating a shitty, always borderline broken excel file that once filled out leads to a back and forth of clarifying questions always with an undercurrent of "them" trying to "teach me how to be a good form fill monkey".
If I should win the next pitch, I will definitely have on e of my team work on setting up a shadow system, a web application that produces pdfs for the finance department that are indistinguishable from the XLS based ones. But with a better CX for me and my people.
LLMs could be a good option to navigating this sludge. Fight fire with fire.
Another option is work smarter (not harder, because nothing I do is anywhere near “hard work”) to get into a position where you can tell them to get fucked. Don’t want to pay my hotel bill? Oh well, good luck finding someone else to rework your auth system. Call me back when the outsourced monkeys you hire end up putting you in the news for a security breach. But at least you saved a few hundred bucks on hotel fees, great job!
This is something management and executive positions do on a continuous basis - using their position and “prestige” to commend respect and bend the rules. But as an engineer with context of a critical system you often have more leverage, it’s just a matter of using it strategically (as engineers we initially start out playing the good game, but the thing is that everyone else is trying to fuck you - the challenge is learning to fuck back).
I keep a beginner’s Python book in reserve for those conflictual meetings where some idiot beancounter or manager has a problem with me. When I’m ready to walk (and at this point I have a very short fuse for obvious bad faith), I offer it to them as a tool to help them finish my job; not a single soul has yet to take me up on that offer. Some idiots suggested me the way to the door a few months later (offer gladly accepted, and replacement gig acquired) and watching from a distance it’s clear they would’ve been better off actually taking that book off me - either for themselves or the idiots they tried to hand my tasks to.
The only way to enact change is to actually make the noxious behaviour costly. If you take on the costs yourself there’s no reason for them not to persevere with their misguided strategy.
I wouldn't be so sure the friction wasn't intentional. They are probably trying to cut costs, and by making the expense report process onerous, you will encourage people to expense things less, and therefore save money.
Similar for me in the corporate world, in the 80s, I just had to save the receipts and give the to the Department Admin. Easy as pie.
Then that all changed in the 90s. Everytime I traveled, using the 'canned' system provided to us, you could spend days trying to fill in the forms. It would ask you for all kind of codes no one knew to supply.
Multiply that by 10s of employees, there is no way firing a Dept admin and contracting that out saved any money. It has to cost the company 2x or 3x as much as one admin costs. And that is a low-ball estimate.
My experience has been that a hell of a lot of “automation” doesn’t automate much, but is used as an excuse to make people do work that didn’t used to be their job.
That reminds me of voicemail systems that are clearly engineered to confuse, demoralize and eventually hang up on folks. I had a major Canadian bank send me to something that simply didn't go anywhere, but took you around the merry go round for 40 mins before revealing it to be a black hole.
Sometimes it's hard to see the incentives, but once you do - it all makes sense. And often they're contrary to what you would assume would be the company's goal.
Agree, but your explanation stops short of the full explanation: because fraud appeared, people were not punished for it, so it grew until it mattered, so everyone was punished with bureaucracy. If fraud would be quickly and severely punished (by termination), it would be at a level close enough to zero to even ignore it. But I think companies think it is better to get lower paid employees with less ethics and save 10k while losing 1k to fraud, per employee.
> If the goal isn't actively set to help and streamline the process
In the reimbursements example, the goal shifted, by design. The environment moved from high-trust to low-trust as the department grew, and the aim moved from "keeping people happy" to "spending less money"/"not being taken advantage of". Not defending it -- I hate paperwork like this -- but it seems almost inevitable as groups of any kind grow large enough and you actually can't assume good faith anymore.
Over the long term, yes. However, universities like Buffalo might have some peculiarities. They are overall run by the state government, and professors/students/staff are state employees. In addition, the money that pays their salary often comes from the federal government (NSF, DOE, NIH) which comes with their own restrictions and regulations beyond typical accounting practices.
So things like reimbursements are handled by a university trying to implement a state government's interpretation of both granting agencies desires and federal and state laws/regulations.
My university seems to be going crazy with rules lately. My hypothesis is that the state, and by extension the university, wants to button down everything so as not draw attention of the federal government (given who is in charge). It's taking already stressed professors (funding cuts, etc) and piling on more stress.
The level of trust didn't change at all, Joann must have read every single receipt as she filled out the forms. A fraudulent or out-of-policy expense would've been noticed either way.
High-trust doesn't mean absolute trust. Hand me a pile of receipts and I'll figure it out (probably with leeway in your favor) is much higher trust than uploading receipt, categorizing, adding explanations for exceptions, etc. One feels reasonable and still dignified. The other feels adversarial and paternalistic.
Joanne probably had to field some "sorry, this can't be expensed" situations, and/or those were reduced because people knew another human was doing the work and they'd get called out, trying to game/abuse the system was less or just naturally discouraged. That was high trust, by both the employee and by Joanne.
With the employees needing to use Concur directly, there's a tendency, since there's a diversity in how each employee will handle the specifics, to try to "save money" by denying reimbursements for any random violation, making sure all i's were dotted and t's crossed. The automated system itself encourages this because it's so low effort to deny and send the expense form back, potentially wearing down the employe that they just give up. Joanne could avoid all that at scale because there was little/no diversity in how expenses were handled. If an i needed to be dotted, she could handle it, and she knew all the i's that needed to be dotted across all expense reports.
I currently have someone to handle my expense reports who sits in front of Concur for me! And that person routinely asks me for specific detail without me having to mess with Concur at all, things like "who was at this dinner you gave me a receipt for" or "I can't find the receipt for this company card charge".
This, the person nitpicking the Concur entries might as well have done Joanne's job and achieve two things at once. Compliance to concur and the regulatory compliance built into the concur process and not wasting everyone's time doing concur
I've seen adversarial approaches in small companies or even an individual boss and I've seen cooperative approaches in moderately large organizations.
The shift toward an adversarial approach in just about any organization is noticeable, in fact, in the US in the last 10-15 years but the US hasn't grown in size that much, large scale organizations existed much earlier.
I remember at a previous job I had to do a fair bit of business travel. The company had their own internal tool for filing expense reports.
I would do the typical thing of "take picture of receipt, upload receipt, specify how much it cost, etc.", and for the most part it was seemless and it would be sent to my bank account.
One time, I bought a box of Fiber One bars at a CVS Pharmacy and expensed that. I got a phone call from the billing department asking why I would expense something like that and I said something like "because I don't usually eat that healthy during business travel and I suspect you can guess the reason after that". They told me they would get back to me, and then I got an email telling me that they rejected the expense report and I would have to file it again to get the rest of my stuff reimbursed.
I can be a pretty petty dude, so I filed it again, completely unchanged, I get another phone call telling me to remove it, and this repeated two more times. Eventually I complained to my manager and he was able to get them to let me expense it and it all worked out.
I find it amusing, because the box of Fiber One bars was less than five bucks. I suspect all the time that they wasted of theirs and mine probably cost considerably more than the $5 would have saved from not covering it.
That is more likely a result of legal requirements. As a general rule any personal benefit you get counts as your income and is taxed accordingly. Expensing is not, instead counting as a business expense.
To avoid people just forming a personal company and declaring everything they spend a business expense and thus not taxed there are rules around what can be counted as a business expense.
If you instead want to take your salary in the form of Fiber One bars, but pay taxes on that spending in dollars, then your accounting department might have had fewer issues since they would not be mixing legally distinct costs and accidentally committing financial fraud.
Why is it a personal benefit? If I am onsite for 5-10 days, I am likely going to have 1-2 bars/day - especially if I am working a high-stress engagement where actually leaving the client site would have taken away my ability to execute to the required level of service.
At some point, policing what each employee eats and how they spend their maximum "per day/per diem" total allowance becomes a cost-drain.
I have been in orgs where some people were frugal and bought essentially groceries, so they could eat in their hotel room - some of that was dietary or health choices and restrictions. Eating restaurant food every single day for 3-meals/day is not a healthy choice (especially years ago when portion sizes were typically far too vast in some countries/regions). Then, in the same group - we had staff who would determine an average size meal - and then ensure that the tips they left would max-out to their daily maximum allowance, to "spread-the-wealth" so-to-speak.
Neither was fraudulent - we were allowed a daily max budget (it was not a per diem), we still had to submit receipts - heck, in our region if you wanted to spend your budget entirely on alcohol, there were (at the time) no red flags.
Of course it is a personal benefit, you are literally benefitting by not spending your own post-tax dollars. However, there are legal rules that allow categorizing certain such expenses and amounts as a cost of doing business even though the manifest benefit is purely “personal”.
These rules have tightened up since the days of company cars and company houses “expensing” employee cars and houses as a tax advantaged form of compensation.
The allocations you are provided and the manner in which you are allowed to spend them are generally considered “safe” from a accounting perspective. There is usually wiggle room above them if you are willing to more thoroughly document or finagle them, but that is extra accounting department cost to do things beyond the safe, well-trod legal path.
If that was true the OP's manager wouldn't have been able to fix it. If finance rolls over it cannot be a legal issue.
37 signals has a story about this, and the birth of policies & procedures that cost far more than the "crime" they're intended to prevent, because in your case it was $5 in granola bars, but that scenario will repeat itself for the rest of time, and extra resources will likely be dedicated to this "problem area". This seems inevitable as companies grow, and is one of the signals I use that it's close to my time to leave.
Didn't you have a specific per day expense budget? I think there is a department of labor guidance for local travel and a department of state guidance for international travel.
Usually, if your per day expense is less or equal to the guidance (where I work we do $90/day), no one cares. If you go above, you pay. The per day expense is for food. Alcohol cannot be claimed as an expense unless you are in sales.
Even in your short, simple comment I see 4? 5? (or more?) pieces of administrative policy that need to be policed, and then we need a process to handle these rules - and the edge cases (ex: what if I'm travelling with someone in sales but I'm the senior employee and we take a client out for dinner? only sales can expense alcohol but typically the most senior employee must pay), and the resubmission process, and the approve of exceptions process, and on it goes...
There was a limit but I wasn't allowed to just buy anything I wanted. I think I got up to $100 a day (not counting hotel).
I didn't expense alcohol.
This maybe for travel expenses but it's the same story for so many things
1. Start with a mostly manual, people labor based, system that works well (handing Joann receipts) 2. It begins to not cost-scale well with growth (department size increases) or a salesmen comes around with a service that offers to do the same thing for less (Concur) or both 3. The company switches to reduce costs 4. The new service is cheaper partly because it offloads work onto employees (filling out travel expense forms) and by cheaping out on the experience (not caring that the forms are not easy to understand and the system is annoying to use) 5. Employees now have to spend time doing a task they never did and their experience is worse
And it stays in this state forever because the observable costs (service cost vs some number of Joann's) are less. The fact that expensive employees (A department full of Phd's) are now wasting time and being annoyed by this system are not seen. The hours used to fill out those forms and lost productivity due to anger are never accounted for. Also the higher ups are detached because they still have their own personal Joann's taking care of everything.
I always say, that finance departments can easily calculate costs. But opportunity costs most of the time don't make it into the books.
I didn't even put in my last hotel bill, because my time was worth more to me than navigating a shitty, always borderline broken excel file that once filled out leads to a back and forth of clarifying questions always with an undercurrent of "them" trying to "teach me how to be a good form fill monkey".
If I should win the next pitch, I will definitely have on e of my team work on setting up a shadow system, a web application that produces pdfs for the finance department that are indistinguishable from the XLS based ones. But with a better CX for me and my people.
LLMs could be a good option to navigating this sludge. Fight fire with fire.
Another option is work smarter (not harder, because nothing I do is anywhere near “hard work”) to get into a position where you can tell them to get fucked. Don’t want to pay my hotel bill? Oh well, good luck finding someone else to rework your auth system. Call me back when the outsourced monkeys you hire end up putting you in the news for a security breach. But at least you saved a few hundred bucks on hotel fees, great job!
This is something management and executive positions do on a continuous basis - using their position and “prestige” to commend respect and bend the rules. But as an engineer with context of a critical system you often have more leverage, it’s just a matter of using it strategically (as engineers we initially start out playing the good game, but the thing is that everyone else is trying to fuck you - the challenge is learning to fuck back).
I keep a beginner’s Python book in reserve for those conflictual meetings where some idiot beancounter or manager has a problem with me. When I’m ready to walk (and at this point I have a very short fuse for obvious bad faith), I offer it to them as a tool to help them finish my job; not a single soul has yet to take me up on that offer. Some idiots suggested me the way to the door a few months later (offer gladly accepted, and replacement gig acquired) and watching from a distance it’s clear they would’ve been better off actually taking that book off me - either for themselves or the idiots they tried to hand my tasks to.
The only way to enact change is to actually make the noxious behaviour costly. If you take on the costs yourself there’s no reason for them not to persevere with their misguided strategy.
That was spot-on.
All too true, and I never actually thought about it, in that way.
I know that it's controversial, but it's my opinion that LLMs could be trained to be Joannes, instead of auditors (the bad guys, on Discworld).
That could be good.
Humans seem to get caught up in mustache-twirling exercises, when they are given any kind of power or authority. Machines could care less.
But also, auditors could program LLMs to be mega-auditors.
That would be bad.
Right now, LLMs are training us to be auditors.
I wouldn't be so sure the friction wasn't intentional. They are probably trying to cut costs, and by making the expense report process onerous, you will encourage people to expense things less, and therefore save money.
>forcing us to file our own travel reimbursement
Similar for me in the corporate world, in the 80s, I just had to save the receipts and give the to the Department Admin. Easy as pie.
Then that all changed in the 90s. Everytime I traveled, using the 'canned' system provided to us, you could spend days trying to fill in the forms. It would ask you for all kind of codes no one knew to supply.
Multiply that by 10s of employees, there is no way firing a Dept admin and contracting that out saved any money. It has to cost the company 2x or 3x as much as one admin costs. And that is a low-ball estimate.
My experience has been that a hell of a lot of “automation” doesn’t automate much, but is used as an excuse to make people do work that didn’t used to be their job.
That reminds me of voicemail systems that are clearly engineered to confuse, demoralize and eventually hang up on folks. I had a major Canadian bank send me to something that simply didn't go anywhere, but took you around the merry go round for 40 mins before revealing it to be a black hole.
Sometimes it's hard to see the incentives, but once you do - it all makes sense. And often they're contrary to what you would assume would be the company's goal.
Presumably this shift happened due to another F word -- Fraud.
Agree, but your explanation stops short of the full explanation: because fraud appeared, people were not punished for it, so it grew until it mattered, so everyone was punished with bureaucracy. If fraud would be quickly and severely punished (by termination), it would be at a level close enough to zero to even ignore it. But I think companies think it is better to get lower paid employees with less ethics and save 10k while losing 1k to fraud, per employee.
> due to another F word -- Fraud.
My guess is the R word —- Retirement.
>> Joann, who was over 60
Just to ensure you know that Joan was not technical, because old.
Well, also to explain why she wasn't there after a time.