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No Way Back From China Trip for Expense-Fiddling Lawyer

Lawyer Gets Fired After Expensing Friend’s $190 Eurostar Ticket

Submitting an expense claim for a friend’s Eurostar ticket or double billing a work trip to China is risky at any job. Doing it at an accounting firm is just asking for trouble.

French auditor Mazars fired a lawyer from his 81,000-euro ($92,000) job after uncovering the improper train journey. In addition, they found a reimbursement request for a 2015 trip to China, that was submitted twice.

Details on the firing emerged as part of a Versailles court of appeals ruling that backed the accounting firm. Despite the fact that Mazars prevailed, the lawyer still managed to get $54,000 in compensation from the judges, mostly linked to overtime and an unpaid bonus.

Mazars declined to comment on the lawsuit. The ruling didn’t identify the lawyer.

According to the ruling, Mazars became suspicious after the man erased his friend’s name on a March 2016 expense report he’d filed for two Eurostar tickets. The French auditing firm delved deeper and found that in November 2015 he’d asked to be reimbursed for a plane ticket to China that he had already billed the company for the previous month.

The former legal officer tried to argue that the cost of the Eurostar ticket was offset by the fact that he didn’t seek reimbursement for his hotel.

But the judges said that the two incidents created too many problems for him to win the wrongful-dismissal case.

The court ordered him to repay the Beijing plane ticket, and dismissed any notion that the double billing of the China trip might have been a mistake due to his heavy work load.

“The amounts at stake were high in this case -- 4,456.02 euros times two -- which meant that the employee should have been particularly careful with his request for reimbursement,” the court said in a June 25 ruling.

As part of the $54,000 compensation, judges awarded the former Mazars lawyer 3,000 euros in damages to make up for a breach of his privacy after the audit firm brought up in court his personal correspondence on his work email.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.