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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/erroneousbosh on 2024-06-02 11:18:23+00:00.

Prompted by /u/TheMobydickler’s tale of Malicious Compliance I thought I’d add my own mileage claim tale.

We had a new office admin start in the expenses department, who decided that all the rules were to be followed to the letter - and if it made it inconvenient for people to claim expenses back so much the better! It’d make her department look far more efficient, reducing costs and all.

At the time I was working in a group of four people, going out to fix things in remote places. We had one company Landrover, which two guys went in, another guy used his own van and claimed for the diesel, and I used my own old Range Rover which was ridiculously suitable for getting out into the trackless wastes. The guys in the company Landrover just used the company fuel card, and the other two of us claimed for our mileage.

But then, I got my mileage back with a note saying that in future, they would not accept the claim without every fuel receipt for the month being attached in full - no copies, no partial receipts, and definitely enough fuel indicated on the receipts to cover the distance claimed for.

Right then, it’s like that, is it?

As I mentioned I drove an old Range Rover (still do, in fact). It’s big, it’s heavy, it has a ridiculous 4.6 litre V8 engine so it can drag trailers up mountains easily, and it gets through a lot of gas. No no, not “gas” like “gasoline”, like the Americans call it. This is Scotland. We call that petrol. I only ever put about a gallon or two of petrol in a month, just enough to get the engine started and warmed up.

Like a lot of older vehicles with big thirsty engines, it’s converted to run on propane. There’s a big tank in the back where the spare wheel would go, a bit of extra plumbing, and a special controller to adapt the fuel injection system to cope. With gas being about half the price of petrol it made a lot of economic sense, especially when I was claiming for anything up to 2000 miles of travel a month.

That is a *lot* of propane. That’s filling the tank about ten times a month, and they want a receipt for every fill-up. So, here’s where the MC kicks in.

I started fuelling up at the local Calor gas depot, making sure I got them to print me off a full receipt for it. Each receipt was three pages of the pink copy of tractor-feed duplicate paper, and you just know it was the wide-carriage 14.5" stuff. Wads and wads and fucking *wads* of bright pink tractor paper for every claim.

The policy lasted three months, then they decided they only needed the first receipt for the month as long as it had a VAT number on it.

A week after they changed the policy, Calor stopped doing Autogas so I had to start getting normal receipts from the supermarket filling station instead.