Google tells employees they can’t expense food when working from home

[whatok]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/google-tells-employees-not-to-expense-food-perks-in-work-from-home.html

[three_seagrass]

This makes sense because the IRS has been coming after Facebook and Google for years to tax their free food as a form of income.

https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-and-free-food-at-tech-co...

Expensing WFH lunches would give IRS more ammo to tie the food to taxable individual employee benefits.

[jjeaff → three_seagrass]

The recent tax law changes completely disallow the expensing of on site meals provided to employees. It has already started phasing out and might be fully phased out by 2021 if I remember correctly. So the IRS doesn't have to fight that anymore.

So they can still provide it to employees, but if they want the tax deduction, they will have to itemize it on employee compensation, which will cause them to pay taxes on it as income.

[kungato]

Yeah, so? No one expensed food when doing a work from home day before covid19. What's next? Expensing your house for staying there?

[spa3thyb → kungato]

I'd think this is for a subset of employees who confused free cafeteria food with an entitlement to never pay for food during work hours.

[lovich → kungato]

I'm fairly certain you can at least get a tax write off of your home office if its dedicated to work

[jrm2k6 → lovich]

Isn't it only if no other location to work from is available to you as an employee?

[CHB0403085482]

Well, you can't expense your car depreciation/usage when you commute to work. Right?

[lazyload]

Seems about par for the course. I'm sure a lot of policy would have to be enacted to allow something like that, and my company (also a large tech company) announced something similar not too long ago.