Say I get lunch on a business trip and lose the receipt, I now can't expense it. In a world where I never keep receipts normally this happens all the time. Being able to recreate a receipt so I can expense looks super cool.
Though I've at times not been given receipts on some of my business trips, my employer has always allowed me to claim the expense back with a reasonably accurate amount, without receipt.
I guess the company takes the fairly minimal tax hit by nownactually claiming it, and they allow it due to trust (and low numbers).
Unless you paid cash, your bank or credit card company will remember the amount for you. I don't know if most restaurants receipts are going to itemize the bill. But even if most do you can just say you went to one that didn't.
Some places want it itemized. Also if you use cash you don't have a CC bill. Back when I was a student I had to often buy things for student events with several hundred dollars in cash because the CC company wouldn't give me a higher credit line at the time. I didn't want to use a debit card, that's risky.
That's easy, because the prices might still be physically listed somewhere if it's a store, or you might still have the Craigslist email thread, or whatever.
If you simply lost or don't have a receipt and it's done in good faith I don't think it should be considered fraud.
It’s only fraud if the information on the fake receipt is false, and if you used this false information get money or a benefit that you’re not entitled to.
I haven't been able to find out what the situation in the States is. But in Germany, for instance, it is definitely illegal as it is considered document forgery. It is thus punishable by up to 5 years in prison, or even 10 years in severe cases[0].
In fact, AFAIK a company is not even allowed to issue an invoice twice without clearly labeling it as "copy of the original" and most companies must keep the invoices they issued as well as their books (and thus the invoices they received) for at least 10 years[1].
I suppose the legal situation must be very similar in other EU countries. One reason being, for instance, that invoices are used (by companies that deduct VAT) to request back from the tax authorities the VAT that one pays on invoices by other companies (in the EU). The invoice you receive from a company must therefore match that company's books. All hell would break lose if everyone could just forge invoices, whether with bad intentions or not.
Case in point: Here[2] is a guy asking for legal advice as he's being charged with document forgery even though we wasn't trying to defraud anyone or anything. Specifically, he had lost the invoice of the TV he was trying to sell on Ebay, so he ended up forging it because Ebay required people to upload the original invoice to sell TVs on the marketplace.
Invoices, and more generally the receipts underlying bookkeeping transactions, are the fundamental building block of reliable bookkeeping (and company audits, mind you).
