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Calif. Court Rules Businesses Must Reimburse Cell Phone Bills
New submitter dszd0g writes The Court of Appeal of the State of California has ruled in Cochran v. Schwan's Home Service that California businesses must reimburse employees who BYOD for work. "We hold that when employees must use their personal cell phones for work-related calls, Labor Code section 2802 requires the employer to reimburse them. Whether the employees have cell phone plans with unlimited minutes or limited minutes, the reimbursement owed is a reasonable percentage of their cell phone bills." Forbes recommends businesses that require cell phone use for employees either provide cell phones to employees or establish forms for reimbursement, and that businesses that do not require cell phones establish a formal policy.
Not uncommon for a salesman to have two cell phones. One provided by the company, and their personal. Aside from the PITA of packing and charging both devices, it makes since to keep both the phone numbers and billing separate.
Life is not for the lazy.
"From now on you are NOT to use your personal cellphones or other mobile devices for any work purposes. You will not be reimbursed. Use a payphone instead, and present all receipts to accounting for prompt reimbursement. Thank you for your help as we prioritize our cost metrics and structure our teamgroups toward innovative human-centered investment"
Should companies pay for part of the cable bill when employee are required to work from home?
To me it all centers around: Was BYOD optional?
If they offered a company device and you refused, then i say you are on your own.
If they didnt offer one but you NEED it to do your job, then i say they are on the hook, as well as tax credit ramifications.
If they dont offer and you only use it as its a convenience to make your life easier, then again, you are on your own.
Furthermore, if you are optionally using your device for office work, they get to mandate policy on its use, up to and including MDM type control.
BYOD is just a bad idea. Companies should give employees the tools they need for their job, and forbid personal devices.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Than any other job that requires you to have your own tools?
I've seen this before at a company in California. My company would only reimburse for work related calls.
You couldn't just submit the entire bill for reimbursement, as if you called your wife and kids 50% of the time you couldn't get reimbursed for that.
We were required to take the physical bill and cross out those calls which were personal so you could demonstrate what % of the bill was work related vs. personal. Doing this for what could be hundreds of calls per month caused people to just not reimburse their usage as it was too much of a pain to do.
Just because it's an accounting cluster fuck doesn't meat that the company should get out of paying.
It's an accounting cluster fuck to determine your vacation eligibility so guess what, no vacation for you.
Following that logic, they should also be required to help pay for my network at home, part of the cost of my desktop, and my work clothes, since they have required me to have all three.
My compensation requirement when I look for a job is dependent upon my work requirements, I don't have to work for a company that won't pay for my internet connection, provide a support computer, or pay for business wear. I choose to work for the company I work for because they compensate me enough that I can take care of those requirements. I'm not one of those people that see 'free stuff' in these rulings. Instead, I see increased costs that will be passed on to the consumer.
Several years ago, a company paid for my relocation. Instead of having a list of onerous rules and requiring detailed record keeping, they gave me a flat fee based on my salary. Funny thing about that, I found the cheapest way to move and pocketed the rest. May or may not have saved the company money, but it sure made my life easier. And no one at the office had to deal with the paperwork, pouring over every receipt to make sure it was allowed. My guess is that the company found, in the long run, that it was cheaper to do it that way. It was their choice, their freedom to decide how to handle relocation. As most company benefits (including medical) should be. That's how a free market economy works, by providing choices and letting competition settle things. Companies with the best benefits/pay/work environment get the brightest and smartest. If someone works for a company with poor benefits/pay/work environment ...maybe it's their lack of marketable skills or motivation that keeps them there.
My company currently does provide support phones because some idiot in security won't let us use Touchdown on our Android phones to get our email. So they give me a useless piece-of-shit iPhone (small screen, no back button, can't install apps on it because of security). Which sits on my desk at home, plugged into a charger and never used. I setup Google voice to forward calls to my Android phone, and setup rules to forward emails from important people to my Android phone. The company spends $$ a month for phones for many employees that don't even use them. I'm can get an iPhone through my service provider, and they will pay for the monthly service if I choose to. But then I have to have a phone with fewer useful features than my Samsung S4, which I prefer (as do many ex-iPhone users that I know of).
Yet more bullshit rules from the land of nanny-government.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
This is what I don't understand about companies. They are too cheap to just reimburse you at a flat $50 rate for your cell phone, and so they will require you, an employee that costs them probably $100-$200 an hour, to go through and cross out the non-work related calls, then they will require someone else in HR who costs about the same to crosscheck what you did to make sure you are not lying, then they will reimburse you $45 because the phone bill was $90 and half the calls were company related. Total dollars recovered? $5. Dollars spent saving that money? $50-$100.
It is the same way with travel. Rather than give you a per diem of $100, they want itemized receipts, which you have to collect, enter into the system, submit, your manager has to review and approve, and then Travel has to audit and approve. All because they don't want you to go eat Ramen and pocket the other $97. They spend thousands of dollars of company time to save a few hundred dollars on travel expenses.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
At my former job the seniors got a $50-per-month phone stipend, but we juniors didn't. I once asked about it and they told me I didn't qualify. I shrugged it off, it was no big deal.
Then one day my phone started ringing after I got home from work; it was my boss. I didn't pick up the call. He called a second time; I didn't pick up the call.
Literally the next day they announced that juniors would also receive the stipend, and would be expected to answer calls when they could outside of business hours. That might be a coincidence but I doubt it. I think they realized that $50 is small change when the input of a 'junior' employee is required to seal a contract.
At the next job after that I was put on "on call rotation" meaning I'd get calls in the middle of the nite to fix problems -- usually to restart a server. They immediately gave me a phone stipend and also an internet stipend.
That is all as it should be. If you expect to be able to communicate with me outside of work hours and work space, then you can foot the bill for that. Otherwise, I'll see you at 9am at the office. If the law in California supports this notion then the law is appropriate.
In fact, they probably are quietly applauding the court's decision. Because the IRS.
The Internal Revenue Service frequently nit-picks employee reimbursement and compensation decisions to death. Pay some key personnel for expenses incurred and some auditor will nit-pick the decision to death. Taxable, not taxable. Reasonable business expense vs discretionary employee benefit. Screw it. The courts has ruled. We have to pay our employees. So you lousy auditors can crawl back into your rat-holes and stay out of private business decisions.
Have gnu, will travel.
Companies would love to give you a $100 per diem for meals. As you point out, in addition to being easier for the employee, it saves them money.
The reason they require you to itemize receipts is because if they're ever audited by the IRS, they need to be able to produce the receipts to prove those were real incurred business expenses. Not imaginary numbers made up to pad the expenses and scam the IRS out of tax revenue.
We also tried it the laid back way - we'll give you a $100 per diem, you don't have to itemize, just collect all your receipts and hand them in after your trip. The accountant who was going to double-check your numbers anyway will just do the itemizing. Net result was that employees forgot to save their receipts or "lost" them. They'd already been paid $100 for the meals, so there was no incentive for them to be careful with the receipts. So back we went to having the employee itemize if they wanted reimbursement.
This is exactly what they do where I currently work, but not for all employees - only ones that require a phone or have a measurable benefit to having one. It works out to about 50% of the bill. I don't have any issues with that as most vendors/etc I deal with very rarely call outside of office hours. Heck, I just got off my cell phone as I was using it for a work related call. (I have unlimited minutes...)
As an extra bonus, I got to put my personal cell phone on a work sponsored plan through our cell phone carrier (the minutes are unlimited to North America, both calls and texting) - this immediately saved me about $45 a month! I still receive and pay the bill personally, and work still reimburses the flat $50. Heck, we were told we could go onto the cell plan even if we didn't need it for work as the bills don't get sent to the company.
I've got no complaints.