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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.
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