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Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting for me for a very different reason:

We're in Germany where this is taxed heavily. If you offer your employees free meals, this becomes part of their taxable income, so you actually have to give them a raise to even this out, and then you have employees that want to opt-out to get the hands on that cash...

I always wondered how Google Germany deals with this. There is a minimum below which it doesn't get taxed and specific items like coffee, water etc fall out of this, but it blew my mind the first time I was trying to set something like this up for our company.

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It's taxable in the US as well.

There have been occasional attempts to enforce the law - IRS recently made noises in 2014/15.

The challenge is that it's taxable to the employees but hard to track and prove, it's for relatively little money per employee, and the firms argue that it's for their benefit to secure information/improve productivity/build cohesion...

Google can and will fight far harder than the IRS is willing to on this issue and the IRS isn't entirely sure that they'd win. The IRS can spend resources in places to make a much higher return with an almost certain chance of success.

So no effective taxes on meals.

To make it happen in your company, follow the Google and Uber strategy. Just do it and deal with the law later.

Your ability to pay any fines later may be different from Google's and the chance that one of your employees will call the tax office on you may be dramatically higher because Germany.

It is not taxable if it is for the employers benefit

Free meals are considered income?

But free benefits are not considered income?

I don't see the difference between the two.

Most benefits are taxable at least in part.

Health is the most tax advantaged, and then retirement. Comes from WWII era rules aimed to prevent wage increases.

How is it hard to prove? These companies offering free food is very well known. It's not like the food is in a back alley behind a heavy door you have to knock on and say, "Walt sent me".

I think he means it's hard to prove at an individual employee level, whether they get their food from here or not.

When I visited Google they were making people scan their badges so they could prove they were complying with the taxes.

They are in the US as well. There's some exception if you can make a case that it's for the employer's benefit, not the employee's. Everyone says it is, and no one tries very hard to tax it.

What I’ve learned early: tax law is subject to negotiation. Depending how well your tax department connects and negotiates with the responsible tax office you can structure things like that.

What stops you from offering a meal for 10c for your staff only? Who determines the monetary value of a meal which would normally be free?

The invoice the company pays for the meal. If cooked on-site, the bills for supplies and salary of the cooks, etc. These things are why companies are required to keep books of accounts.

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