Recently, I traveled on company business with a colleague. To save money, we agreed to share a hotel room. My colleague booked and paid for the accommodation in its entirety. I paid nothing for the room, or the rental car that they also booked.
Now that we are back, the company is telling me that I need to request reimbursement for half the cost of the hotel room. And, when I get the reimbursement, pay that to my colleague.
Does this sound correct? No other company I've been with would think it's correct to apply for reimbursement for something that the employee didn't pay for.
Even curiouser: the company has now said it wants to authenticate that I paid my colleague, and to do that they require a cancelled check to be presented to them once the whole fiasco is over.
Addendum
The travel office eventually decided that they wouldn't pay either of us until I had paid my colleague, and they had received a copy of the cancelled check to validate that I had paid. I refused to give in to this insanity, and deleted both my expense report and my original travel request, saying that I wouldn't be claiming my airfares or per diem allowance for meals (nor paying for "my share" of the accommodation that the company was eventually paying for in full).
Then, magically, they found a way to pay both me and my colleague what we had spent without involving me in the accommodation transaction at all.
My advice: DO NOT GIVE IN TO INSANITY IN ACCOUNTING.