Every six months or so, I clean out my inbox and take down from my tackboard all the receipts for my professional expenses. For a couple of days, I get to play amateur accountant, looking for all the world like the cliché of an American small business owner preparing to engage the IRS with a shoebox full of slips. It is not that I am complaining: I am fortunate to have a job where the costs associated with teaching, research, and service can be reimbursed. But these funds are a negotiated benefit, of course; if we did not have them, we might have a higher salary or different medical coverage. While it is fabulous to be able to afford to order from the United States an edition of a textbook not yet available in Canada, please do not begrudge me my grumbling as I try to determine the proper exchange rate to use when indenting for said purchase.
I love my accountant friends, but I am not an accountant.
The kindly older gentleman who used to oversee the ham-fisted attempts of academics to manage their petty expenditures used to call our submissions, with great affection, our “swindle sheets.” It is not that we try to mislead; it is simply that some of my colleagues are woefully inexperienced in the close tracking of money. I remember once applying for and receiving a travel grant, $1,100 to give a paper in Quebec City. By using airline loyalty miles, I discovered that I could continue on to Philadelphia to give a second paper, only to learn that, because I did not list this gathering on my initial application, none of my incidental expenses (hotels, meals, taxis) could come from that fund. Still, it was in my dealings with another financial officer that I reached the end of my rope. I used research funds to travel to an archive to review manuscripts. “Why?” he asked, with no hint of humour, “could you not just go to a library in Calgary?”
If my attempts to impress upon my professional colleagues something of the research world have not always been successful, I have embraced the strange world of financial auditing with enthusiasm. Combined with my love of speaking with people about their jobs, I have bored hotel clerks and cabbies around the world with explanations of how we track money at the University of Lethbridge. On a recent trip to Arizona, I told the woman on the desk at our hotel that I needed more than the invoice that had been slipped under the room door that morning.
“My receipt must show a balance of zero,” I explained. “Otherwise, my institution might think we had cheated them.”
“Cheated them?” she looked surprised.
“Imagine that this invoice asked for $500, but you agreed to charge me $200 in cash,” I continued. “With an invoice that requests $500, I might be reimbursed for an extra $300 that we had arranged to split.”
“Oh, no, I could never do that!” Her look turned to one of horror.
“I wasn’t proposing that arrangement! No, no!” I tried to reassure her. “I was trying to explain why I need to show my employer how I actually paid you $500.”
She looked wary.
I should have explained to her the joy of a library archive. Right, I am going back to my receipts now: all showing balances of zero, I assure you.
I haven't been reading your blog much, since I've been busy with other things and my brain can only hold so much. But I had to click on this post, simply because of the title, when it showed up on my aggregator. I smiled at the allusion to Billy Bragg. It took me back about 25 years to my University of Wisconsin days. Thanks for the memory.
Posted by: Mary | January 17, 2012 at 08:52 AM