Is this common? I’ve had access to company credit cards before on a one-off basis (never in my name). Do people legitimately make this mistake? “oops, I put it on the company cards”?
This isn't a bad system because it allows for use in case of absolute emergency, but you have the safeguard of anyway requiring a receipt and a justification.
The article just says he used that card. They did not say it wasn't paid off.
i've done this with like a cup of coffee but not something like a game for my kids! What happens in my case is the charge is not approved for reimbursement and it's up to me to pay the bill. I feel bad for that father.
edit: it's a corporate card but it's in my name so I can actually charge whatever i want but the company only reimburses approved charges, whatever is left over is up to me to pay. As a sibling comment said, what everyone does is use their regular personal cards for the rewards/loyalty points and then submit receipts for reimbursement manually. In consulting where you travel a lot this can be thousands per month in rewards.
It's worse than that, because he specifically entered the company card to pay for robux. It's not like he added the company card for an earlier (company) purchase and then it accidentally got used.
>Dave said he entered the company card himself to buy Robux for his son, and it then sat saved on the Google account that also carries his work email, calendar, and files. Dave did not say why he used the company card for that purchase.
Moreover I can't think of any reason why he would be using the company card in the first place. In any company with proper controls you'd have to justify every expense and/or reimburse. It's just simpler to use a personal card, unless he was trying to embezzle some money.
It helps reconcile purchases orders, and on the accounting side for purchases that aren’t directly attributable to something we track in the ERP.
The dangerous part is effectively it’s tied to virtually unlimited credit without oversight, but it’s a serious criminal offence to miss use it so no one is going to purposely use it for personal expenses (embezzlement/fraud).
A very good friend was in IT support... Clients were visiting the country and his boss couldn't take care of the clients (last minute family issue or something). Somehow he tasked my buddy to "entertain" the clients and gave him a company card.
My friend went berzerk: restaurant, then too many drinks in pubs, then titties-club with champagne bottles etc.
He hardly remembered a thing in the morning and he exploded the company credit card spendings (not $118 K but well into the 5 digits).
The boss told him: "Oh well, at least the clients had fun". And my friend didn't get fired (which he thought he would).
Don't know if it's common but I take it's not that rare.
Corporate cards are generally set up to allow this. If you're traveling on company business, there's a relatively high chance your personal card gets denied. Especially when on corporate travel -- if you use the corporate card for airplane, hotel and car, the personal card use for souvenirs looks a lot more like stolen card use. Companies don't want employees inconvenienced while on company travel, so they allow use of the company card for personal expenses as long as the expenses get properly claimed and paid back.
Very handy when I don’t want to use my money for whatever reason but also don’t want the company to know everywhere I’ve been
I had very high spendings so it would have been easy to smuggle something. I never did that because it is simply stealing.
I now have a company card at my name. The company bears the cost and it has an extended reimbursement time. I have to reimburse it so it is in my interest to file expense claims quickly. But I could use it for anything.
"The button said approved every time as nobody had set a limit."
There is undoubtedly still some balance threshold that will trigger an internal account review and probably a phone call, though.
From the information in the article, I can’t really blame Google for this one. This was a series of deliberate blunders on the part of the father. The first blunder was letting a 9 year old have a YouTube account.
Putting aside whether a 9 year old should be making videos, the father should have been the one with the account and managing the channel.
"to a company credit card the father had saved to his own Google account, which his son also used"
It sounds like the son didn't have an account. It was just the father's account, with billing info attached with no limits.
It says his son also used it, so he gave a 9 year old access to it. Same difference.
It's strange to me how much allowance we provide corporations and their schemes to make money, and so little for the stupidity of the users that end up forking over their wages.
I would expect some verification or contact, but maybe I just don't understand how world operates...
> maybe I just don't understand how world operates Amazon decided friction during purchase is more costly than asking for CVV/CVC. For better or worse (like in case of Ford Pinto) corporations can count their money.
Suddenly, I don't feel so bad about that anymore.
Should tech companies make this kind of thing this easy? No.
Everyone in here defending our corporate overlords has had the Overton window moved so far on them that they've lost perspective on how companies should be expected to be part of the social contract.
We should be building a world that makes it easy for people to do the right thing. Not penalizing them for accidentally doing the wrong thing because nothing matters anymore but the shareholders.
Youtube is a fact of life for modern parenting, and it has absolutely atrocious parental controls. As we all know, these companies are filled with people who are perfectly capable of building systems that function to make the world better and easier for everyday people like the father in this story.
And yet somehow we're defending the fact that they're doing the exact opposite...
This ought to be a salient lesson: never store card details online despite the convenience. Further, as I do, use only a debit card for online purchases with the available credit only marginally more that for one's immediate purchase. It's also an excellent policy in case of being hacked.
Companies that allow employees to use cards with essentially unfettered credit have to take a large amount of the blame in circumstances such as this. There's no reason other than bad policy or irregular monitoring of expenses to allow expenses of this magnitude to build up. The company's financial policies need drastic overhaul.
theandrewbailey•1h ago