> It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.

Yeah, it's hard to convey to people who've never been responsible for setting (or proposing) policy that it's not a game of optimizing the average result, but of minimizing the worst-case result.

You and I and most people are not out to arbitrage the company's resources but you and I and most people are also not the reason policy exists.

It was depressing to run into that reality myself as policy controls really do interfere sometimes in allowing people to access benefits the organization wants them to have, but the alternative is that the entire budget for perks ends up in the hands of a very few people until the benefit goes away completely.