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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.
P.S. The CEO got a $12 million Christmas bonus and kept it all.
Alphabet is not so poor that their charitable deeds must go through taking a chunk off their employees' salary. If it mattered that much to the execs, why don't they cut their own salaries for the year to cover it up? They wouldn't even have to slash it by that much to cover the 30M.
The intent of this twisting of words is clear: to make it socially unacceptable to complain about it. It's utter bullshit.
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.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses...
If Alphabet is actually donating shit in the employee's names, then the employee can deduct it.
Alphabet pays the tax on the gift to the employee (see the link). The employee donates the gift and deducts it.
The fact that the employee never received the gift directly doesn't matter. All that matters is whether or not Alphabet is donating on its employee's behalf, as stated in the summary, or if it's donating in its own name.
The giver (Alphabet) pays the gift tax, not the recipient (the employee). The donor (the employee) gets to deduct it.
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.
So it doesn't matter whether the company or the employee gets the deduction - it works out the same either way
It isn't the same. It can matter alot.
First, the company is picking the charity, not you. For example, someone impacted by breast cancer may want to donate to a charity related to that instead of handing more money to schools. I know at least two dozen charities that are more appropriate than throwing more money to my local school district which has already gotten a tax levy to spend $1.2 MILLION on giving students iPads. (I would be VERY unhappy if my employer said they valued my work so much they were going to give more of my money to a "charity" that was already taxing me to do the same thing.)
Second, if you get the money it may put you in a status where it makes sense to itemize, and you may then deduct a lot of things that would otherwise not be deductible. It may increase your giving because you know that you can deduct it.
Third, it will appear on your annual income statements, which are used by the SSA to determine retirement payments, or if a year counts towards retirement at all. It can also have an effect on how much you can borrow as it will be shown as income.
But overall, giving the money to the employee means that the employee chooses where his money goes, not the company. It may help the tax liability of the employee by allowing itemization to increase deductions after donating the money. Or it may simply be a really useful $3000 if it isn't donated.
In either case, it isn't the same thing even if in some cases the ends are the same. The ends don't justify the means.