Meta fires staffers for using $25 meal credits on household goods
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The company doesn't provide a laundry detergent/wineglass/acne pad benefit. They provide a food benefit. If they give you uber eats or doordash vouchers and you choose to spend it on something that is not food, you are committing expenses fraud.
You may think to yourself "all dollars are green, what's the harm?" but it's not even close to ambiguous for me. They provide that voucher for food. If you spend it on something else, that's exactly the same as if you just stole the money.
Of course that sort of assumes that the firing wasn't the end goal.
There likely was some threshold which some went over and everyone fired should have known based on written policy.
Ah yes, it was in the EULA. Which everyone always reads.
If you've got an otherwise good employee it's incredibly dumb to lose them over this. Clearly they can see when people are abusing the system, so why not warn them before they go over the threshold for getting fired?
“Incredibly good” is a value judgement we don’t have evidence to assess but I don’t think you could support that claim here in any case: people who break ethics rules on small things are pretty likely to break them on big things. No mstter what else they’re bringing to the table, that’s a risk.
Let's say you make employee of the month and receive an amazon voucher to be spent "treating yourself" but instead use it to buy a gift for your spouse.
Is this fraud? You made no false claim about how you would use the money. You did receive it with a specified use though.
What if your employer gives you a £500 a year raise and states it is to cover the additional costs of work from home. But you already have a nice chair so you but groceries. Is that fraud?
Seems borderline.
Expensing food is tax deductible. Allowing people to buy whatever they want is taxable income.
The only companies that would allow their employees to buy whatever they want are those that aren't worried about getting audited.
No. No. No. No. Go to hell. Seen the company store thing before. Not doing it. Not inviting that back into the world. Take the fetish of programmable cash/scrip and shove it.
And until we talk about wage theft seriously, I am not willing to even budge that most employers have an actionable harm committed against them. Again, the collective/corporation cannot resist the urge to conspire against the individual any more than the individual is known to get the most out of the machinations of the collective. No one at the table has clean hands, but the collective through scale has far dirtier hands than by average the individual does.
The section on de minimis meals covers what is allowed. Buying toothpaste and groceries doesn't fall under that exclusion. Employees doing this were inadvertently causing Meta to commit tax fraud with unreported fringe benefits.
More likely what happened is this was a reason to fire someone they didn’t want anyways. The fact the enforcement is uneven also exposes them to additional liability. It’s likely any one of these employees could sue for wrongful termination, if they were not given a written notice of the proper usage of the perk.
I wouldn’t want to employ someone who saw their sick leave as something they deliberated used up in full each year (even when they didn’t need it). It’s a similar attitude IMO.
Asking this as someone who is not familiar with this particular system. I lived in countries where I got meal vouchers, but every place that accepted them only allowed me to buy food with them, and they outright refused to sell anything that can't be eaten (if they even sold anything like that)
Why is this against the rules exactly?
Doesn't it seem quite extravagant to pay 20 USD for breakfast or lunch? Are the 70USD taxed?
I remember SF as being about as expansive as about anywhere else for the equivalent quality.
Same in the other west coast cities and NYC, except Portland. Portland is probably $5 less.
Note that the article says the meal credits are for prepared food delivered to a Meta office location, so the meal credit also includes cost of delivery:
> Staff based in smaller offices without a canteen are offered Uber Eats or Grubhub credits, for example, for food to be delivered to the office.
De Minimis Meals
You can exclude any occasional meal you provide to an employee if it has so little value (taking into account how frequently you provide meals to your employees) that accounting for it would be unreasonable or administratively impracticable. The exclusion applies, for example, to the following items.
Coffee, doughnuts, or soft drinks.
Occasional meals or meal money provided to enable an employee to work overtime. However, the exclusion doesn't apply to meal money figured on the basis of hours worked (for example, $2.00 per hour for each hour over 8 hours), or meals or meal money provided on a regular or routine basis.
Occasional parties or picnics for employees and their guests.
Section 13304 of P.L. 115-97 changed the rules for the deduction of food or beverage expenses that are excludable from employee income as a de minimis fringe benefit. For amounts incurred or paid after 2017, the 50% limit on deductions for food or beverage expenses also applies to food or beverage expenses excludable from employee income as a de minimis fringe benefit. However, food or beverage expenses related to employee recreation, such as holiday parties or annual picnics, aren't subject to the 50% limit on deductions when made primarily for the benefit of your employees other than employees who are officers, shareholders or other owners who own a 10% or greater interest in your business, or other highly compensated employees. For more information, see Regulations section 1.274-12. While your business deduction may be limited, the fringe benefit exclusion rules still apply and the de minimis fringe benefits may be excluded from your employee's wages, as discussed earlier.
Note the occasional and meal. This wasn't intended for every day or non-food items.
This was a person they wanted to let go and needed an excuse to get rid of that would save them severance and lawsuits, I'd wager.
They clearly work hard to find opportunities to impact employees.