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Alphabet Donated Its Employees' Holiday Gifts To Charity (fortune.com)
The employee perks at Google are legendary, and they've always included an over-the-top holiday gift for every employee. In the past, the company has surprised its 70,000 employees with Nexus phones, Android smartwatches, and Chromebooks. Fortune adds:This year employees speculated they might get Google's new Pixel phones or a Google Home unit, the company's competitor to Amazon's Echo. But they forgot: They don't work for Google anymore. They work for Alphabet. Instead of a shiny new gadget, Alphabet employees got an email. On Thursday Bloomberg published a bruising story about the new, cost-conscious regime of Alphabet, driven by its corporate re-organization and its ex-Wall Street CFO, Ruth Porat. Shortly after the story hit, employees were informed that their holiday gift this year was a donation to charity, Fortune has learned. Alphabet donated $30 million worth of Chromebooks, phones, and associated tech support to schools on its employees' behalf.
Money for people.
So, get to work. waddah think we are running here? A charity?!
"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
If I can't write a donation off on my taxes, then I didn't donate it. Fuck you Google.
So does this mean the employees get the write off or just Alphabet?
It actually seems like a pretty reasonable employee gift to me.
It's weird of them to not give their employees some of their own products though, make employees happy, and get people talking about the stuff.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
P.S. The CEO got a $12 million Christmas bonus and kept it all.
We just didn't want to give it to you.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Any employer can donate the gifts (or funds) they would have spent on employees, or any amount for that matter, to charity. That part of the story is clear and good on Alphabet for helping out needy schools to the tune of more money than I'll ever make in my lifetime.
What is not accurate is the phrase "on its employees behalf" and other posters have already indicated that if the employees don't get the tax advantage, then the donation is not "on their behalf." Indeed the incentive is for Alphabet to get the deduction, effectively providing a $30M gift which costs them probably half that.
However, unlike other posters who say "If I'm not getting the benefit then F*** them" I think on it this way: If I were an employee and was told "This year instead of giving YOU a gift we're giving one to a poor child in need" then I would think about whether I was ENTITLED to a gift (no), or whether I just got spoilt and greedy and want want wanted a gift, and now I'm crying my big head to sleep on my big pillow.
Good on Alphabet. Good on everybody who supports helping out those in need.
E
P.S. I'm not a tax expert, lawyer, nor doctor. But I do write my opinions on the Internet.
If they had paid the employees then the payroll costs would be an expense so the net effect for the company is the same. Donating the money to charity makes them look nicer but has the downside of pissing off the employees.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
is give your stuff away to the schools. The tax write offs basically pay for the whole thing and in 10-15 years the kids hit the job market trained on your software (on the public's dime, no less).
Not that I oppose computers in education, but we should be buying what's needed directly instead of these round about scams where we pay for it anyway with tax write offs. That way kids get what they actually can use instead of what the mega corps want them to have.
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VMware sent out an email to employees and said "There is $$$ in your http://brightfunds.org/ account. Give it to whatever charity you care about". And the employees do get the tax write-off.
- Vincit qui patitur.
An unlike what gavron thinks, this is not a god damn "gift". This is a "reward".
To me that is exactly right. Going forward will Google donate different amounts of money to charity at the end of each year depending on employee performance? That would seem to be the case if they really are taking bonuses and giving them away.
No matter what I can't see how this is good for morale, or retention in a pretty hot hiring environment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
to add insult to injury, this is probably a thinly disguised move to unload slow moving inventory and deduct it at full price + "tech support"
OMG LOL FTG
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You just don't do something like this.
EVERYONE knows this is a tax write-off even if you honestly didn't intend it to be that way it is how it will universally be interpreted.
If you didn't want to give Christmas bonus simply not giving them to people may be a disappointment but pulling this shit is far worse. It is essentially telling your employees to go fuck themselves while announcing they will not be receiving a bonus.
Given current labor environment whoever made this decision to announce donations like this should probably be asked to resign.
The person doing the "giving" (Alphabet) gets the tax write-off, so the employees got absolutely nothing. Alphabet is in no way required to give their employees gifts, and I think it would have been better if they didn't. This is just an failed attempt at good PR. I'm happy Alphabet is donating to charity - they just shouldn't be pretending they're doing it for their employees.
The tax deduction isn't money you get back from the government. It's the government saying they wont' tax the income you ended up donating to charity. As such, there is no difference between the company "giving" you the money to donate (counts as income on your taxes) and you getting the tax write-off (government doesn't tax that income), vs the company donating the money in your name (doesn't count as income, you don't get a tax deduction).
e.g. Say I'm at the 25% tax bracket. Company gives me $4000 to donate to a charity, which I do. Come tax time, the government says you received $4000 in income from your company so you owe $1000 in taxes. But you say I donated that $4000 to charity. The extra $4000 gets erased (deducted) from your income, and you're no longer liable for the $1000 in taxes. It's as if you never received the money at all, and the company gave it directly to the charity instead of to you. (Except if the company had given it, they would get the $4000 deduction to reflect that the money was donated. But that just equalizes the direct donation scenario to if they had paid it to you $4000 as wages - a deductible expense. Rather than kept it as taxable profit. Either way, the government is not taxing the money that changed hands because the final recipient is a charity.)
So it doesn't matter whether the company or the employee gets the deduction - it works out the same either way. (There are rare instances where the tax law is specifically or accidentally crafted to give you a tax deduction even though you never received the income. I ran across one of these a couple years back when i donated some stock to a charity. I received a deduction as if I'd sold the stock thus receiving the proceeds as taxable income, then donated the money to the charity. Except since I never sold the stock, I didn't have any taxable income to report for this stock. True, I had paid taxes on the money I used to first buy the stock, but the stock had appreciated a considerable amount and my deduction was actually several times larger than my initial cash outlay to buy the stock. So these situations are not impossible. But they are the exception to how deductions work, not the norm.)
If a company wants to donate to charity, fine. However, when management makes the decision without any employee input, do not say it is on the employees' behalf. At least have the decency to be honest.
something socially responsible
Screw the workers by not giving them something that they usually get. Check
Make a massive donation to gain a huge tax write off when you already pay next to no taxes. Check.
CEO takes a bonus likely equal to the after tax donation that was made for saving money and screwing employees at the same time. Check.
Get either shills or complete idiot's support on Slashdot for actions. Social responsibility at its best.
When I worked there, I had to live out of a refrigerator box.
If your company removes money from you and gives it to someone else, that is called Robbery.
But if the company just doesn't give you a Christmas/End-of-Year gift that they had been voluntarily giving previously, it may be a disappointment but it isn't Robbery.
= = = =
It may also be really stupid move on the company's part, though. It's going to cost them a bunch in employee satisfaction, and thus performance, over the next year or more.
Of course, if they were thinking of replacing a bunch of the employees with H1Bs or the like, tweaking them off so they perform poorly could then be used in claims that they were not good performers and thus needed replacing.
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Do you think upper management ever sent themselves a letter that said in effect "Instead of your regular big bonuses, the company has instead donated X $Millions to a charity in your name. Have a Merry Christmas."? I think not. If they would never do this to themselves, why do it to all the other employees?
What makes me laugh is nobody's actually stated the obvious, looking after the poor and the needy is the Government's job.
Except it isn't obvious, and it isn't the government's 'job'. Looking after the poor and needy is why charities exist.
The reason the charities aren't able to do their job is because of people like you who think their tax dollars are all they need to "give" because "it's the government's job" and donating to charity is just "a tax dodge." I.e., the reason why donations to charity are tax deductible is specifically because the it is their job to help the needy and the government wants to promote that activity.
They didn't donate money. They donated last year's hardware at full retail writeoff. So it's more of a business move to get rid of old inventory for more than they could get from a firesale than charity.
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