No, there isn't a typo in the title - it is rather a nod to two separate ideas of reward. All will become clear...
Because game money cannot be converted into real money, then the main rewards that can be given to players is new abilities. Whether these abilities are 'skills' or 'equipment' is functionally quite irrelevant: they both increase the ability levels of the character that the player is playing, and thus expand the scope of what is possible for both player and character within the confines of the game.
Original D&D famously tied advancement to money (or treasure anyway); magic items and killing monsters also provided a route to advancement but since they were obtained in the same way, that doesn't change anything important here. It got some stick for doing this but it had one great advantage: the reward to the characters and the players was very directly for doing the things that they ought (in the premise of the game) to be doing. In my opinion, it also provided a very useful degree of moral hazard: it was perfectly possible to play a bad - or very bad - character simply because the incentive to do so readily existed: optimize for getting more money, whether from friend or foe.
Later RPGs and D&D itself moved away from this but something important was lost: the reward system tended to become more complex, nebulous or both; whereas the OD&D approach basically successfully optimized the reward system to the essence of the game. Complex systems tended fundamentally to want to model some kind of 'real world' process for skill improvement whilst nebulous systems that rewarded 'good roleplaying' were intrinsically subject to GM fiat and caprice as well as, potentially, creating tension at the table since 'playing in character' as a player goal can interact quite badly with other players, although doubtless some groups really thrived off this.
And so to Shadowrun. Shadowrun is a game dominated by money, since it is in a world dominated by money - even more than the present. The tag line from 5e, Everything Has a Price, kind of epitomizes this. So there might be quite a good case for linking 'Karma' awards in Shadowrun to money, with the big-earning characters definitionally playing in the big leagues, so to speak, whereas 'street-level' characters earning street-level money would be slower to advance (and hopefully, face lower odds). What this might be precisely is open for debate and experimentation, but maybe 10000Y per karma point might be a good start point.
However, there is another use for money in Shadowrun and that is to track 'reputation' - think 'Reward' as in Wanted: Dead or Alive. The value to/for/or against a corporation, or any other organization in the Shadowrun world can be tracked via nominal money gained or lost. And given the nature of the corporation in the Shadowrun world, this makes a lot of literal sense: everything would be done on a cost/benefit basis. This is in addition to any other considerations: killing someone's family in the course of a run goes above and beyond the money, but that motivation applies to family and friends, not the 'organization' as a whole (and especially not a corporation). And this creates a specific mechanic that players can take advantage of: is their beef really with the thrill gang, or just with a few members? And if the players benefited the rest of the gang to the extent that they were in a positive relationship...well, that could be very interesting in terms of roleplaying. Conversely, it also gives an incentive to limit the damage - why generate pointless emnity by ratcheting up the Nuyen cost even more...unless, of course, your other friends are secretly delighted by this. In any case, I have been using it in my current Shadowrun campaign and it is working nicely as a way of tracking who friend and foe is, and who will get out of bed to make their life a misery, and to whom they are just too insignificant to even watch. As a last thing, it could/should/would determine the resources that an organization would expend to get them, but I haven't made that procedural yet. Coming soon.
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