Employees naturally expect their employers to reimburse them for any expenses they’ve incurred on their behalf, says Tax Tips & Advice. While these will be free of tax and national insurance when incurred as part of their job, it means employees must collect receipts for every item and their employer will eventually have to process them all.

One way to avoid this hassle is to implement a “scale rate payment” based on the average amount your employee spends a month. “Your employee won’t be required to collect receipts and you won’t need to check or report anything to the taxman.”

To set this up you’ll need an agreement from the taxman, which means you’ll have to show the payments are intended to “do no more than meet your employees’ business expenses”.

Employees don’t need much encouragement as they’ll welcome not keeping receipts and can benefit financially. If, for instance, you pay a

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Identity theft happens all too frequently. A few careless mistakes with your personal information and you could be in the clutches of a ID thief.

Within minutes, someone could have your social security number, date of birth, and your mothers maiden nameall the crucial information needed to begin opening new credit in your name and placing fraudulent charges on your existing credit accounts.

How do you prevent identity theft and fraud from happening to you? Here are 10 steps to safeguarding your personal information and make sure ne’er do wells don’t snatch your credit identity.

1. Be Alert Whenever you’re using your debit or credit card, make sure that no one can see you put in your pin number or get a close look at your card. Debt

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Bank of America started it all with their ridiculous $5/month fee to access your own cash by using a debit card and customers reacted by moving to credit unions or online banks like PerkStreet or Ally Bank. Verizon followed up with a fee for paying your cell phone bill online and customers cried “FOUL” so loudly that the company quickly backed down. It seems that companies, like governments, are obsessed with finding new ways to extract additional cash from customers and citizens.

There’s nothing wrong with getting your customers to give you more money … so long as you provide them with more value. Where these two giants erred was that the customer got nothing in return. Customers will gladly fork over more cash when the product or service warrants it. But whe

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The Medicare and Social Security Trustees released their 2011 report today and the outlook is marginally worse. Social Security will run a cash deficit of $110 billion between 2010 and 2014. And Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Fund will run out of money five years earlier than expected.

One surprise was the change in life expectancy in the Social Security report. The actuaries now assume men will live six months longer and that women will live about three months longer. That’s good news for older Americans, but it also means Social Security has to write more checks to beneficiaries. The change in life expectancy accounted for half of the change in the forecast.

Other than that, the big news was in the Disability Insurance program. That program has a separate trust fund that is now projected to run out in 2018. 10 million people get disability benefits from Social Security.

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Signing up for a credit card from a retailer can be cumbersome. If you take the application home, it often gets misplaced or forgotten. But if you fill it out at the store, you have to fish for a pen, fill out the form by hand, and often hold up the checkout line while doing so.  Shouldn’t there be a better way to get store credit cards? Now there is — with your smartphone.US Bank has announced a new program that will enable consumers to apply for and receive retailer credit cards using their smartphones. The financial institution is partnering with retailers to enable quick, easy, and convenient credit card applications with the help of an app that can be downloaded for free to your iPhone (an Android app is expected soon).

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The U.S. store credit card market has changed dramatically, especially over the past few years.

A large number of retailers got out of the credit card issuing business by selling their store credit card portfolios and outsourcing their card operations to private label credit card issuers. This resulted in a major shift in the ownership of U.S. store credit card receivables. As of year-end 2004, U.S. private label credit card issuers share of the store credit card market receivables was 85% versus the 45% share in 1999.

The trend did not end in 2004. Most recently Federated and Bon-Ton stores announced that they have agreed to sell their store credit card portfolios. By the end of 2006, when the conversion of these portfolios are completed, private label credit card issuers will increase their market share to more than 92% (based on 2004 figures.

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