Manager has refused mileage claim - AIBU?

[wonderingwanderer2]

I work in the community and so submit my mileage expenses each month. I tend to write my visits in before I do them otherwise I worry I will forget - this is clearly not a good strategy due to what has happened below and I will now do them retrospectively.

I submitted my July mileage and my manager rejected it on the basis that there was one entry that was incorrect - a face-to-face visit had been changed to an online one and I had forgotten to delete the entry - she had seen that it was a Teams meeting in my diary. I apologised and deleted the entry and resubmitted it. I have only just noticed that the mileage for the whole month (a substantial amount) has been rejected again.

Is she allowed to do this? Obviously I was at fault for not deleting the other entry when the meeting was changed to an online one, but AIBU to think she's wrong to not pay my mileage for the rest of the month now the incorrect entry has been deleted? How should I raise this with her?

No absolutely do not contact her for crying out loud. Chill your beans and wait till Monday.

Based on the information the OP has given this is definitely not fraud - if they were to refuse to pay her legitimate expenses or dismiss her she will have a claim against them (I’m a lawyer and I deal with quite a lot of fraud cases - it’s entirely different to forgetting to update a form one time)

Agree with others though that in the circumstances they may want to do a review just to confirm that it wasn’t part of a consistent practice of inflating the claims. Many people do get away with expenses fraud due to lax approval/audit procedures.

@Completelyovernonsense what part of it is fraud by the employee, which can lead to the owners and senior employees of the company being convicted of fraud by HMRC if fraudulent claims are passed on to them you don't understand?

Plenty of employees in different roles have to wait 4-8 weeks to be reimbursed for travel expenses.

If you cannot afford to wait that long to be reimbursed then you need to find a different job.

Oh and mileage claims rarely fully cover fuel costs especially now.

I’ve always had to do mileage claims retrospectively.

Do you think I could contact her over the weekend about it?

If she works over the weekend yes then contact her.

Otherwise don't. No need for you to behave badly even if she is.

"Quite apart from anything else, how can you know what your mileage will be before you have made the journey? Even regular journeys can unexpectedly deviate from the planned route and so vary from the normal mileage."

I've always just put in the shortest return journey via google maps, I've never claimed extra if my route has been diverted do people really do this? How are they measuring their diversions is there software that can do this (genuine question).

Yeah where I am your claims would have to be audited now.

Re: fraud, I worked with someone who was fired for doing exactly this. Filling out overtime sheets ahead of overtime worked and then not deleting hours that never went ahead.

It was a repeat course of action, which they discovered on investigating her. Honestly OP I hope you haven't made this mistake before as they'd be right to look into it.

@letmechangetheatmosphere I take photo of the miles on my car at the beginning and end of the journey when I remember. Sometimes I forget.

You recognise your process is not ideal

i suspect she is pissed off

talk. To. Her. Reassure her that you will adjust your process and request payment of the mileage due to you

Interesting! I'd never remember to do that but I can see why you would if you were doing long journeys. Last job I was in was a small charity and my base was home so I was logging several daily journeys of only about 5 or 10 miles each, wouldn't have been worth my while photographing everything.

@letmechangetheatmosphere this is what your trip button is for.

the correct way to record mileage is to note the start on your odometer, and note the finish. Either by photograph, notation or trio meter.

I would use my Tripmeter but I've no idea how to in my new car 🤣🤣🤣

I've always just put in the shortest return journey via google maps, I've never claimed extra if my route has been diverted do people really do this? How are they measuring their diversions is there software that can do this (genuine question).

My car is very old and basic but even it has a button that sets the mikes to zero so you can see how long each trip is. If you don't know how to do that on your car just check the hand book or Google it?!

The "person in finance" should not work in finance.

1. its fraud if the event never happens and there is no refund to the company
2. is becomes taxable/NIable BIK for the employee and a HMRC auditors love to find this in an audit because if finance / HR are careless around payroll they are usually as careless around other financial transactions too.

I'd text her personally. You should have checked, but we all make mistakes

As I explained in my later post I wouldn't bother doing this for the kind of mileage I was claiming, interested that people do though.

Maybe you need to resubmit the whole claim, rather than correcting just the one mistake?

It isn’t at all dramatic. It was a fraudulent claim and it would be remiss of the manager to not check previous and future claims thoroughly, perhaps the supporting evidence was not sufficient in view of OPs memory lapses.

She should of course be reimbursed for the genuine trips once manager is satisfied, OP needs to ask the manager what is required to support a res mission of the expenses.

When you submit expenses, you usually make a sign off that they are genuine expenses that you encountered on company business. As such, you cannot make the argument that it was an error. Same as signing anything, you need to check it properly, your signature is your word, that I didn’t read it / check it before signing is not normally a defence if something goes wrong.

As I explained in my later post I wouldn't bother doing this for the kind of mileage I was claiming, interested that people do though.

But you go to the effort of Google mapping it - that takes longer. Miles add up quickly when it's lots of little journeys. I was more replying to your surprise about software being available though which isn't needed when you've got a basic function on your dashboard

While it is likely that the OP's error has resulted in the expense missing the payment cut off the company will have the right to verify that in-person meetings happened and do an audit on prior claims.

Another possibility is that if OP's manager leaves an unapproved claim sitting open that it automatically gets rerouted to the Managers manager, most online systems have that to prevent a build up of unapproved claims by lazy managers or where the manager is not available for some reason.

Nobody can say anything definite on error/fraud without looking at the company policy. Some companies who have had problems in the past have a zero tollerance on expense errors.
When I was involved in setting up a new expenditure system on of the things which was built in was a warning that it was the employees responsibilty to ensure that the claim was correct. Some senior managers were upset at the fact that while they could delegate the inputs and had some autoload from credit cards only their ID could submit the claim to prevent them pushing the responsibility of the error on to a junior.

If OP is telling the truth about the error then it's likely not to be fraud however at this stage the manager does not know that. Historical expenses will need checked to know.