Employee clothing discounts are now a taxable benefit

[max_boost]

This is insane. How are they gonna track this?

[revelations]

Just more black market.

Well done to those who elected the fliberals (not that I was a huge Harper fan).

This is just the start, folks. More socialism/Quebec pandering coming no doubt.

[sabad66]

this is a pretty ridiculous to start taxing. It will be more paperwork than it's worth to manage, so i imagine companies will just cancel these perks.

[rage2]

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Let's assume the normal fare for a flight is $500 but because you're a WestJet employee you only pay $100 (plus taxes). The $400 discount is now shown as a taxable benefit and you pay based on what your personal income tax rate would be. If you're at a 25% tax bracket then that means you're out of pocket $100 so that $400 discount your employer just gave you is really only a $300 savings.

Fuckers.

It also means if you didn't setup your withholdings to account for that at year end, you'll be facing a $100 bill for this one discount alone.

So I buy a lot of stuff through friends on their employee discounts. Because of this, they'll be facing a tax liability for helping me out.

[austic]

This is funny, most of the people with the retail type jobs wanted the liberals to tax the rich and now they are getting screwed too.... I could see this being huge for the airline industry as I have friends who fly non stop on weekends using their standby.

[ExtraSlow]

If your village has five farmers and only one has an oxen to pull his plow while the rest must rely on thier stout wives, it would be impractical to give oxen to the other four. Very practical and fair to slaughter that one oxen and put everyone on an equal footing.

[Twin_Cam_Turbo]

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Let's assume the normal fare for a flight is $500 but because you're a WestJet employee you only pay $100 (plus taxes). The $400 discount is now shown as a taxable benefit and you pay based on what your personal income tax rate would be. If you're at a 25% tax bracket then that means you're out of pocket $100 so that $400 discount your employer just gave you is really only a $300 savings.

Fuckers.

Thanks Bill. I was a little unclear I’m actually more curious how they come up with a “standard price” when things like flight prices change? It would seemingly be kinda hard to track?

[Lanks]

Also the employees would usually be flying standby. It's hard to assign a value for a seat that would otherwise be empty. My understanding is this is why we have not been taxed on standby travel up to now.

[Tik-Tok]

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Thanks Bill. I was a little unclear I’m actually more curious how they come up with a “standard price” when things like flight prices change? It would seemingly be kinda hard to track?

From how I'm reading it myself, so long as regular customers have access to the same price at some point in the year, then they can give the same discount any time of the year to the employee.

I don't think this whole thing is going to stick though. They're already reviewing it after the announcement yesterday.

[Sugarphreak]

...

[zhao]

This is a enforcement nightmare for those who wont follow the law, and a paperwork nightmare for those that do follow it. Plus the whole grey area where if I buy something with my business' discount from a supplier, or if I sell something to myself at cost, because I ate the cost of parts for a customer job once that year. What a ill conceived idea...

Also, whats next? taxing business lunches?

[spikerS]

TELUS employees used to get an employee rate plan as "ambassadors" of the service. Paid $15 a month for basically unlimited Canadian calling and texting, and like 2gb of data.

Then, it all changed, you got 40% off any in market rate plan, but you got taxed on it.

They also have a rewards program. You are given "points" which you can then redeem for gifts from a catalog. Toasters, movie passes, golf clubs...whatever. Lets say you redeem your points for $100 gift card. You get taxed on that $100 gift card, but TELUS would pay that tax, so, on the $100 card there would be a $30 tax, but then that $30 to cover the taxes in a taxible benefit too, so, it increases to $39, and keeps going up until it basically zeros out. It's fucking comical.

[speedog]

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TELUS employees used to get an employee rate plan as "ambassadors" of the service. Paid $15 a month for basically unlimited Canadian calling and texting, and like 2gb of data.

Then, it all changed, you got 40% off any in market rate plan, but you got taxed on it.

They also have a rewards program. You are given "points" which you can then redeem for gifts from a catalog. Toasters, movie passes, golf clubs...whatever. Lets say you redeem your points for $100 gift card. You get taxed on that $100 gift card, but TELUS would pay that tax, so, on the $100 card there would be a $30 tax, but then that $30 to cover the taxes in a taxible benefit too, so, it increases to $39, and keeps going up until it basically zeros out. It's fucking comical.

Ya gots to start collecting a TELUS pension, then there isn't any tax deduction for the 40% employee discount. Trudope will probably take care of that though.

[rage2]

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They also have a rewards program. You are given "points" which you can then redeem for gifts from a catalog. Toasters, movie passes, golf clubs...whatever. Lets say you redeem your points for $100 gift card. You get taxed on that $100 gift card, but TELUS would pay that tax, so, on the $100 card there would be a $30 tax, but then that $30 to cover the taxes in a taxible benefit too, so, it increases to $39, and keeps going up until it basically zeros out. It's fucking comical.

We do the same thing for employee rewards. The big ones are the 10 year gifts because they’re massive, and ya the tax on it that the company calculates and pays for is hilarious math.

[googe]

Does this actually have anything to do with Trudeau? It's not like he can tell the CRA what to do, right? Is this the CRA's own doing?

[Buster]

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Does this actually have anything to do with Trudeau? It's not like he can tell the CRA what to do, right? Is this the CRA's own doing?

The CRA reports to the minister of Revenue...who reports to Trudeau. Who reports to Bert and Ernie, as far as I can tell.

[rage2]

Trudeau boosted CRA budget by a couple hundred million dollars in last years budget with a mandate to find more revenue with a focus on tax cheating, so yes this is directly related.

[Zhariak]

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The CRA reports to the minister of Revenue...who reports to Trudeau. Who reports to Bert and Ernie, as far as I can tell.

Hahaha

[googe]

It's quite a logical leap to go from "increased funding for a government agency to find cheaters" to "staff discounts are now taxable". I mean, what PM is going to have any clue about how that works? It was probably delegated 3 times to someone in the weeds before that decision was made. Someone now had a mandate to find more revenue, and they aren't very good at their job, got desperate, and came up with this as a way to meet that.

In all likelihood he had nothing to do with it, and when he heard that this was how they planned to find cheaters, he probably had the same reaction that we do, and likely told them to chill out on it and go work something else out.

Thanks Obama

[mr2mike]

Who's feeding him these ideas? A 1st year in industry business grad?!
The amount of govt jobs this would add is large, just to verify and track all these taxable benefits over at the CRA.
End goal, have everyone being a govt employee?