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I used to work for a large consumer products company. I was required to take 3 two-week trips per year to different European countries. On one trip, after business dinners for an entire week, I decided that I just wanted pizza and beer for dinner. This cost under $10 which I paid for in cash and put on my expense report.I received a tersely worded memo requesting that I don’t put cash receipts on an expense report. Only use the corporate credit card.On a subsequent trip, once again, I wanted a simple, cheap meal (again under $10) which had to be paid for in cash. Once again I put it on my expense report.This time I got called down to personnel. I met with someone who angrily spoke to me about my $10 cash receipt. I tried to explain that this meal was cheap and that any place that I ate with a credit card would be much more expensive.At that point she became hostile and said “This is not your first offense. I’m putting you on the list!” I said “Fine, put me on the list.” and returned to my desk.Thirty minutes later my boss came to see me. He said “Jeff, this is the stupidest conversation that we are ever going to have. You’ve been put on the list. Whatever it is that you did to get put on the list, don’t do it again. These people love to get people fired and they have the power to do it.” I explained about the $10 meal vs. the expensive restaurant meal. He told me that if I wanted to do that, just leave it off my expense report. He often traveled with me so he understood the whole cheap meal thing.The next trip that I took, I only ate at restaurants that took the corporate card. I didn’t have many meals that cost under $100 and I had some that cost more. That was all fine with personnel. No cash receipts was OK with them regardless of how much my meals cost. When I wanted pizza and beer, I had the hotel get them for me at a cost of over $50. It was on the corporate card so it was still fine.

Pure chance.I worked with a guy who seemed OK and then one day we were told that he was terminated and no reason was given to us. As it turns out, I was good friends with the girlfriend of one of our auditors. She knew what happened. This guy had turned in an expense report that said he had dinner with a client. The expense report he had turned in was followed by one turned in by a sales rep saying that he had taken the same client out for dinner on the very same date. The auditor was thinking “Wait a minute… didn’t I just see this client’s name?” He put the two reports side by side and realized they both couldn’t have gone to dinner with him.The sales rep had attached a credit card slip and they contacted the client who said, yes, he had dinner with the sales rep and, no, not with my co-worker. The guy I worked with attached the stub from one of these:If you’re under the age of 50, you’ve probably never seen one, but if you went into a coffee shop or restaurant, they’d write up your order on one of these.Notice the number on top? The auditor then pulled out older expense reports from this co-worker. A detail they hadn’t noticed was that all of the receipts he was turning in from restaurants all around the country were consecutively numbered! The co-worker bought a pad of these and would turn in a fake receipt with each report. Unless you have reason to lay his expense reports side by side, no one will know. He must have been doing it for years. Never more than $30–50 a time and no one ever looked at consecutive reports before so it went unnoticed.If this guy and the sales rep hadn’t happened to have their reports get reviewed back-to-back, I don’t think he ever would have been discovered.EDIT It’s been brought to my attention that what I described is not embezzlement, but fraud. I agree. I don’t have an embezzlement story, sorry.

I wasn’t fired. I learned that another secretary had been hired to do a fifth of my normal duties at twice my pay. First I asked for a reasonable raise, but I was turned down - so I quit, giving them two weeks notice. They didn’t actually believe that I was leaving.I worked for one week and repeatedly suggested that they needed to assign someone to perform my duties so I could train that person. It never happened. Then I took the week of vacation that I was due, during which I started my new job.The second Monday on my new job, the old company realized that I was the only one who knew how to do all that was involved in getting the field engineers’ timecards and expense reports done so they would be paid that coming Friday. This was way before cell phones were common (around 1986), and I didn’t tell them where my new job was. When I got home Monday there were multiple strident messages on my answering machine asking why I wasn’t present to handle the timecards.I called them and, wonder of wonders, my boss was still there at 6 p.m., trying to figure out how to handle the time cards. He offered me more money. I explained that I was already getting more money (and better benefits) at my new job. He didn’t have any budget for consulting fees and I wasn’t willing to go back to do what needed to be done for free. I have no idea how they got the time cards and expense reports done, but it was officially Not My Problem at that point.