The Barometer needs to stay away from gas stations. The portrait of America painted there is worrisome. Once again, the task of filling up a rental car was at hand. Gas pump #8 had a receipt dangling from the previous purchase — a receipt for $68.05. The Barometer’s rental car fill-up was $6.86, but no receipt arrived. The trek into the clerk for a receipt was more of an exchange. The $68.05 receipt turned in along with a request for a new receipt on Pump 8. The puzzled clerk looked at the receipt left by a previous patron, an amount 10 times the Barometer’s fill-up and asked, “Why don’t you just use this receipt?†Well, such skullduggery in submitting expenses is not the stuff of good business relationships. But, and here comes that concept of volume again, it isn’t at all clear that a Chevy Cruze tank would hold $68.05 in gas. With a 15.6-gallon tank, well, do the math. $3.37 per gallon isn’t going to get you to $68.05. And at $0.33 per gallon, well. . . (See last week’s post for insights on that price).
Apart from the fact that “it just ain’t right,†as Mammy would say to Scarlett and Rhett, to stick someone for expenses you did not incur, there are the odds of the truth percolating. With receipts, percolate they will. The type of car is on the rental car receipt. That receipt also has total miles driven in the marvelous rental car. Put the gas receipt next to the rental car receipt and, well, there would be some explaining to do. It would be tough to need even 4 gallons of gas when you drove a total of 45 miles in a car that gets 25 miles per gallon on city streets. Even tougher to explain where the additional gallons beyond 15.6 went on the Cruze. Oh, how math, volume, and the laws of physics can help on the audits of expense reports. Oh, how they serve to remind us of risk when “it ain’t right†is not enough to keep us honest.