Company refusing to pay expenses

expense

I hope this is the right forum for this question. Apologies in advance if it is not.

My employer has decided that they will not pay expenses if they are over one month old. They must be in by the 10th of the month or they will not be paid out. These expenses are a mix of fully vouched so include a receipt of each expense that would of been paid out of the employees pockets and of a subsistence allowance for lunch. Is there any recourse if the company were to refuse to pay or is it a case of its their house so their rules?

Thanks for reading.

seamus

A company is not legally obliged to pay business expenses, however they must take an "all or nothing" approach to it - i.e. you either pay out expenses or you don't.

If they do not pay business expenses, then the employee has the option to not incur them in the first place.

So I imagine that the employer is entitled to attached conditions to the submission of business expenses. Many places do operate this kind of rule because it allows for accurate reporting and forecasting when your employees put their expenses in on time. We have this rule in place, but we didn't always. We used to see people putting through all of their expenses on a yearly basis - tens of thousands of euro. They were actually using it as a form of savings, building up their expenses to stupid levels.

That has a knock-on effect to financial controlling because you suddenly are paying out a huge chunk of expenses that you couldn't have predicted.

So I think a one month rule is reasonable, unless the employee is on business for longer than one month with no ability to submit expense claims.