This post made me remember my time at a firm about 15 years ago. Per diem food was $15 for breakfast, $25 for lunch, $50 for dinner. We were told to buy the food with your firm card and submit photos of the receipts using your contact number.
One day I spent $35 on dinner. And the photo of the receipt was a little fuzzy. By the time I noticed it (when I went through the photos and assigned them to meals) I had lost the paper copy. So I got reprimanded by our VP. All photos must be clear and easy to read. He also confirmed that meals under $25 didn't need receipts. All righty.
Before I got that inbox, I had thought over our per diem policy and its potential loopholes. That was the day I decided to begin exploiting it. Challenge accepted and malicious compliance begins.
I have very simple tastes. Give me a flip top can of chili and a plastic spoon and I'm fine. Plus that way I can just go back to the hotel and rest. I don't have spend the time at a restaurant or hit a drive through on the way back. So about $10 a day is plenty. But the firm was offering $140 and receipts were only required for transactions over $25 dollars. (EDIT: My math was off here, the firm actually offered $90)
So the first day of travel I'd go to Walmart or Costco and get my food for the week. I'd do three separate transactions, one for $15, one for $25, and another for $25. That took care of my food for the week. I always went as cheap as possible, since any extra money I spent on food was money I couldn't spend on something else.
Then I'd spend the rest of my travel days buying whatever I wanted, never spending more than $25 per transaction. Costco and Walmart were ideal. They offered cheap food, food I liked, and also all sorts of other things. I knew I couldn't be greedy. If every day I came right up to the max of each meal per diem, but not over, and never submitted receipts, that would seem strange. So I'd ensure to bucket them into only one or two transactions per day. I did this for years. As long as each receipt added up to less than $25 and I only had one or two (allocated to lunch and dinner), no one cared. For a while.
Then there was an outage for an airline where I had to stay an extra week onsite. I had no clean clothes. So I went bought some clothing at Walmart, more or less as I had done before. I had a new boss and new VP by then.
My new boss noticed and freaked out. He and I spent hours on the contact number together trying to slot each receipt into some acceptable category. It was hopeless though. It was impossible to disguise those Walmart purchases by mixing them in with all my other Walmart purchases. No matter how much canned chili you eat, it's still canned chili. So I sent in my expense report, in all its Walmart glory.
My boss made it sound like someone would roll up to my desk with a siren on their head. But nothing came of it. I laid low for a few months after that and ate some really nice expensive meals. Then my boss got transferred. I got a new boss who had no knowledge of this history. I went back to my old ways.
Over time I bought kitchen towels, bath towels, water bottles, sippy cups for my kids, stuffed animals for my kids, books, tools, glasses, pants, shirts, jackets, a toaster, walkie talkies for my kids, headphones, etc etc. And I probably saved the firm a couple hundred dollars each trip (I always came for just under a week.) So it was a win-win.
Thank you for largesse old firm. And you're welcome for my thriftiness. The money I saved you went right to the bottom line!