[Jeff Higgins]

I do a lot of emergent travel for my company in support of AOG ("aircraft on ground") repairs. The company makes allowances as far as the level of detail expected on expense reports related to this sort of travel. It was kind of their way of making up for the midnight, two hour notice, get to the airport and we'll tell you where you are going and how long you'll be gone treatment. The problem now is, however, that the company has off loaded all expense report processing to some Indian firm. This firm just lumps AOG travel in with pre-planned business travel, and challenges us for the details we were previously allowed to ommit. Fewer and fewer of us even answer the phone in the middle of the night anymore...

There have now been trips where I have spent more time once home battling the Indian bean counters than I spent on the trip. What really irks me about that is that I'm not allowed to charge that time against the trip; I wind up charging it against my department's overhead budget. I'm trying to convince my manager that we need a seperate budget to charge to for dealing with our expense reports, so that we can gain some visibility on just how much it is costing us.

It's frustrating to me when I consider that our company trusts us to fly halfway around the world to repair up to $170M machines, but does not trust us to give accurate expense reports when we get back. The battles tend to be over a relatively few dollars, or over percentage points on exchange rates. This, on expense reports that can easily go well into the five figure range if we are gone long enough. Oh well; like I said, there are getting to be fewer of us that will even pick up that phone when it rings in the middle of the night. They reap what they sow...