As travel expenses can quickly add up, efficient travel expense reimbursement processes are crucial to maintain financial health and employee satisfaction. Expense management in itself is terrifying for payroll professionals. How to compensate employees for the hours spent traveling on business is becoming one of the major concerns of the payroll department today. Many recent changes in federal and state wage and hour rules as well as economic pressures on employers and employees alike can create a situation that can practically invite non-compliance lawsuits—especially if the travel time results in overtime being owed to the employee. So, as an employer you must ensure that you are following the statutory guidelines when in comes to expense management.
But it isn’t just the DOL that is interested in travel pay, or how you are working on expense management. The IRS also has strict regulations on when employees can be paid for travel expenses without it being considered wages. Does the company use the per diem method to reimburse employees or the accountable plan method? Or do you even need to have a method when it comes to reimbursing employees for travel expenses? What about per diem?
