I didn’t get it right when I told this tale the other day, but it’s all coming back to me now.
The events in this story occurred in the winter of 1985 at the Usenix Conference in Dallas, Texas. I was working for a company in Cambridge, MA called Mirror Systems (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Times Mirror Corporation, a major publishing conglomerate). I was the Vice President of Technical Development. Our IS group, under my management, comprised two people: our operations manager and our systems programmer. We used the UNIX operating system, and so the Usenix conference was an important event to these people and to some of the developers as well. The company sent perhaps eight people to the conference. I went too. I went because as manager of a UNIX shop, I felt the need to know as much as I could about the technical environment.
Now, like many subsidiaries of major corporations, Mirror Systems, despite its small size, was subject to intense financial controls by the parent company. And like many technically oriented companies, especially in Cambridge, its internal culture resisted such control. The people who attended the Usenix conference were among the most technical of our staff and therefore in general were among the most resistant to the financial bureaucracy our parent company imposed. And among the technical staff, none was more resistant than our systems programmer Franklin, Unix wizard extraordinaire.
Mirror Systems employees were subject to limits imposed by the parent corporation on how much we could expense for a breakfast, lunch, or dinner. And expenses over a certain amount (perhaps $25) had to be accompanied by a receipt. Wanting to have one dinner at a particularly good (and expensive) restaurant in Dallas, those of us traveling to the conference agreed that we’d skimp on dinner expenses for the rest of the conference in order to afford this one splurge of a meal.
Eight of us were present for dinner. The meal was great. The wine was excellent. When the bill came, Franklin picked up the tab and put it on his credit card. This surprised me—he wasn’t much of one for dealing with finances—but he assured me he wanted to do it.
When Franklin’s expense report crossed my desk the following week, I saw at once the amusing pattern that had prompted his eagerness to pick up the check. For the entire duration of the conference, he had expensed only $5 for each meal—probably less than he had actually spent. There were no accompanying receipts for these expenses, none being required. And for the one dinner, he had expensed the entire tab for a meal for eight at a pricy restaurant—perhaps $600. It made me laugh. I approved the expense report and submitted it to our comptroller for processing.
The next day, the president of the company called me into his office. The comptroller was there. He looked very upset, and the president no less so. “What is the meaning of this expense report?” asked the president.
“I know it’s a lot for one dinner,” I explained, “but there were eight of us there. See, Franklin has listed the attendees. We all ate very inexpensively all week long so that we could have this one meal. Look at all the expense reports, and you’ll see.”
“That’s not the problem,” said the comptroller. “I can’t submit this to corporate.”
“But why not?”
“This will stand out like a police car with its lights on. If we submit something like this, we’ll get audited for sure. And that will be more work for me than you can imagine.”
“Why would they audit us? The expense report is legitimate. If anything, Franklin has cheated only himself by understating the amounts he actually spent on meals.”
“That’s exactly the problem! Who spends exactly $5.00 on every meal, all week long? It looks too suspicious. You have to tell him to vary the amounts.”
“You mean, submitting $600.00 for one meal is okay; it’s the $5.00 meals that are the problem? And if he submits some meals for $5.00, some for $6.50, some for $8.95, that would be okay, even though it would cost the company more?”
“Yes!” Relief shone on the comptroller’s face.
And so I had to tell Franklin that the pattern was really beautiful, but that we needed random numbers here. And so it was done.
And no, we didn’t get audited.