A reader writes:
I work in a nonprofit recovery organization and as the department admin, I schedule a lot of the staff for the conferences and travel and handle the receipts.
My office is in a tense space right now. Several of our staff were fired last month due to a very big, very embarrassing, very avoidable HIPAA breach and one of the people fired was our assistant director’s girlfriend (yeah, he was openly dating a subordinate.). People took sides, management was split. HR is doing a lot of mediation. Just send in the clowns and it’s a circus.
Where do I even start documenting and covering my butt with this nuclear bomb I found on my desk this morning?
I don’t report to the assistant director, but he is well-liked, hence why nobody really looked twice at him dating a subordinate. While processing his receipts from a training in a big flashy fun city last week, there are multiple charges to his room for food for meals for two, liquor bills which aren’t allowed on company cards, and he upgraded the hotel to include a couple’s package and the hotel called and advised me of a cleaning charge because of some romantic “paraphernalia and stains” were left behind (oh barf).
All told, the bill came out to three grand, which is $1,800 more than the allowed budget for the trip. He also submitted a very wonky looking reimbursement request for a second plane ticket that he had to pay for out of pocket, his reasoning being I booked the flight wrong (it’s his girlfriend’s ticket). There are pictures of them all over social media on the plane and in the hotel room and doing touristy things all week. He definitely took his girlfriend, who happens to have been fired from our company, on an expensive and kinky-sounding vacation he thinks we’re going to pay for.
I have to report any staff misuse of the company cards to my boss immediately. My boss is very good friends with the associate director and can’t look past his shortcomings and managerial misconduct because of it. He’s going to blow it off and accounts receivable is going to want a full account for what was spent and why. I know I can’t be held accountable for him being disgusting but I’m just sick of the way this department is being run after the last few months of debauchery. This used to be a great place to work.
Good lord.
Here’s yet another reason why managers really shouldn’t be friends with their employees, because when one of them has a paraphernalia-fueled sex romp on the company dime, people get nervous about reporting it.
Of course, this is a company that apparently let a manager openly date a subordinate, so I suppose a manager’s too-close-to-be-objective friendship isn’t surprising.
Anyway. If you weren’t required to report this to your boss/the associate director’s friend, I’d suggest just reporting it all to whoever manages your finances and letting them sort it out. But since you’re required to talk to the boss/friend, just be very, very factual. For example: “Bob submitted receipts for $1,800 over the maximum limit approved for the trip. Here are his receipts. It looks like some are for things we’re not permitted to approve, like liquor, meals for two, a couple’s package at the hotel, and a special cleaning charge because of damage to the room. He’s also submitting for a second plane ticket and said it was because the first was wrong — but the first ticket was used and the second was for the same flight (or whatever is true here), so we can’t reimburse the second. Based on these expenses and the photos he’s posted on social media, it looks like he had his girlfriend join him, which I assume we’re fine with as long as we’re not paying her expenses. I’m passing all this along to Finance to sort out and realized I’m supposed to give you a heads-up as well.”
In fact, you might fill in Finance before you talk with your boss, so that the information is out there and he can’t order you not to send it to them. (And send it to the highest-up person on that team; you want someone with real authority seeing it.) If your boss is upset that you’ve already sent it to them, you can express confusion — “They’re the ones who handle reimbursements so I thought I’d need to send it all over to them like I normally would?”
If you get the sense that your boss is going to blow this off, you have the option of escalating it to someone with more authority than him (or possibly to HR, if they’re decent and have either power of their own or power to get the ear of someone else). Whether or not to do that depends on how vindictive your boss is or isn’t, as well as how fed up you are. But you can get some cover by just being matter-of-fact about your actions, meaning that you act as if of course you’re flagging it for others — you’re not acting out of malice or with an agenda, you’re just dutifully fulfilling your obligations as of course the company would expect you to.
my coworker wants the company to pay for a week-long sex romp with his fired girlfriend was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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