Question on using affiliate links in company purchases

Hi, everyone,

I am totally not familiar with this, but with the Honey scandal it really got me thinking about affiliate links. I work in a managerial position, and many times my subordinates will send purchasing spreadsheets to my purchasing department with a bunch of items from amazon (we work on R&D and we need all sorts of tools/consumables/etc). We are not big, so we just send spreadsheets to them with links and they click on them and purchase the items.

I was wondering if they could be sending those links with an affiliate user id. If so, is that something that would cost the company more, or is the affiliate link price the same as the price without the link?

I'm not concerned about them earning money, to be honest, as long as it is not something that could hurt us or cost us more.

I also wonder, if this is actually allowed by Amazon (maybe it isn't?), then why aren't more people doing it? Sounds to me like a lot of small/medium-sized businesses could have purchasing requests in the 10's of thousands coming from each employee and not rely on a proper system (like SAP or the likes), which would amount to some non-negligible side income for the employees that issue these purchases.