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Does Your Company Pay For Broadband?
masq57 writes "My fellow administrators and I used to have company provided ISDN lines in our homes so that we could respond quickly to issues after hours. That was changed in the last few years to letting us expense our broadband service. Now our new CIO has elected to stop that benefit using the argument that we should be dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen. The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers. What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?"
I agree with the parent here. If the company you work for doesnt pay for the means for you to be contacted or work outside the confines of the business hours (or business facility) they should not expect you to be on call or do any work under those curcumstances.
Period.
I know from experience that if a company starts looking for ways to shave that extra inch off their expenses in that way; that the company is in deeper trouble than they let on. You'll be looking for work elswhere shortly wether you like it or not. heh.
....move along....nothing to see here....
Yes if it is an 'unrembursed' business expense broadband, cell phone and pager you can write them off on your taxes.
Just be thankful that you can at least do that.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
You'd need to be paid very little (or pay a lot for broadband) to cross that line.
On the flip-side, you can also start a small business on the side (sell Beanie Babies on Ebay, for all it matters) and you can write off the broadband bill and computer stuff, too.*
*(To the extent that your profit from the side job exceeds your costs. You must make a net profit for two out of three years, or the IRS just calls it a "hobby", which has a different classification.)
IANAAccountant, but I do my own taxes and forget it.
Employee business expenses have a 2% AGI floor on Schedule A. What that means is if your income is about $60K a year, you don't get to deduct ANY of those expenses until they are more than $1200. If you have $1500 in expenses you get to deduct $300. (If you make more than $140K it's even further limited.) Whoop de frickin do.
If the company provides you a benefit (company car, home broadband, computer, blackberry) that you can use for personal use, they are supposed to report that personal use ($/%) to the IRS as imputed income, which Uncle Sugar uses to soak you on 4/15.
Yeah, right.
This is a pretty strange conclusion you've come up with. The way I would look at this situation is that, if the company is in trouble and might have to force layoffs, then I need to get my ass out of that job and move to a company that knows how to run its business correctly. If providing the tools employees need to do their jobs is too expensive for a company (tools which cost a tiny fraction of the employees' salaries), they have a serious management problem.
However, looking at the situation of the original poster, it seems like it's more of a case of them hiring a new hatchet-man than just simple financial troubles.
I'm in the UK, and got myself a second phone number for my cellphone from Second Number. It sometimes points to my cellphone, it sometimes routes to an answerphone. And it costs me nothing to have or use. :)
-- Soruk
I think there are two sides to this. The CIO is getting pressure from the CFO/CEO to reduce overhead yet maintain the services that the organization has grown accustom to- Do more with less. The CIO is in the middle and unfortunately, isn't creative enough to develop his internal soluion without shafting his employees nor articulate enough to elicit the resources from the CFO/CEO to support such programs. At some point, management, including the CIO, needs to realize that you are only paid for 40 hours, so anything above and beyond that requires appropriate compensation or benefits - leave early, come in late, comp time, team building, etc. Most importantly, the CIO should not ask his employees to do anything that he isn't willing to do himself. Yes, the duties of my IS department are the responsibiltiy of my team - I take call too.
I've worked as a machinist in the past, and you can't get a job as a machinist unless you're willing to pay for the tools you use. Each employee has to have his own unique set of tools, costing thousands upon thousands of dollars. Traditionally, it was only measurement instruments you had to own, which should last a lifetime. The reason you had to have your own instruments is because they're delicate tools being used in a "rough" environment, and they will be best cared for by the person that owns them (company property gets trashed). But lately, the US economy is so bad, that companies are expecting machinists to buy their own CONSUMABLE supplies, like drills and such...These things get used up, and the employee has to keep buying them. For example, if the company is doing well, and has a lot of orders, the employee will be buying more tools to produce more revenue for the company. On top of this, it's not unheard of for an educated and skilled craftsman to make $7/hour doing robotic/automated manufacturing and programming on high tech multi-million dollar machines - You IT people have no idea how bad it can get...