It’s called expense fraud.

I call the meal expense abuse “soft fraud” because people kind of know it’s fraud, but they think it’s small enough that it shouldn’t matter. Like the “eh that’s fine” commenter above: They acknowledged that it’s fraud, but also believe it’s fine because it’s not a major fraud.

If someone spends their employer’s money for personal benefit in a way that is not consistent with the policies, that is legally considered expense fraud.

There was a case local to me where someone had a company credit card and was authorized to use it for filling up the gas tank of the company vehicle. They started getting in the habit of filling up their personal vehicle’s gas tank with the card, believing that it wasn’t a big deal. Over the years their expenses weren’t matching the miles on the company vehicle and someone caught on. It went to court and the person was liable for fraud, even though the total dollar amount was low five figures IIRC. The employee tried to argue that they used the personal vehicle for work occasionally too, but personal mileage was expensed separately so using the card to fill up the whole tank was not consistent with policy.

I think people get in trouble when they start bending the rules of the expense policy thinking it’s no big deal. The late night meal policy confounds a lot of people because they project their own thoughts about what they think the policy should be, not what the policy actually is.