Facebook has a lot of money. Facebook wants to keep its workers close to the office, and it is willing to pay for it. As reported by Reuters, the social networking behemoth is offering workers ten thousand dollars or more to move within ten miles of the company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters.
It’s a move that has the potential to entice employees to work longer hours by easing the stresses and reducing the wastes of time caused by lengthy commutes. It sounds like a good idea, so why aren’t more companies doing this? The simplest answer is money. Virtually no company has as much money to spend as Facebook.
But it also has to do with taxes. Unlike retirement funds or healthcare expenses whereby the government provides explicit tax benefits for companies to help finance employee benefits, housing stipends are generally taxable.
New York Representative Nydia Velazquez has introduced a bill in Congress that would provide a fifty percent tax credit on employer dollars used to provide renter or down-payment assistance. Small businesses would receive a one hundred percent credit.
According to a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, only three percent of companies presently offer to help with down-payments on a home.
