Personal expense vs. business expense, an ethical question

Every company has policy on business expenses either on its employee handbook or other written policy as guideline. Business people have business expenses like business meals, office supply, equipment, business communications (including phone bill, internet fee) and travel expenses (including airfare, personal mileage, hotel expenses, and meals). Marketing and Sales people who conduct business with external people and customers have the most expenses.  I think almost every business person and business entity faces the challenge of differentiating business expenses and personal expenses because sometimes there’s no fine line between business expense and personal expense. For example, if you meet for a former colleague and also a friend for lunch, is it a business lunch or personal lunch? Should it be paid by you or your company? I think business people especially marketing and sales people face this situation often should be able to make the right call and it’s important for us, MBA student to make the ethical decision from what we have learned at CAMLAT.

I think it takes two sides’ effort to make sure the company assets are not paid for personal expenses. We, as employee should try to make the ethical decision as possible and provide as detail as possible for business meals like listing of attendees, reason for business expenses.  If the conversation during lunch is more related to personal matters, the lunch should be considered as a personal lunch thus should be paid as personal expenses, same for meals that are more on a personal level between colleagues like potlucks, after work drinks and get-togethers. As the company, periodic auditing should be enforced. Is there’s a question raise regarding to a business expenses, it should be communicated to the employee as soon as possible.