employer provided cell phone policy

Sally

I'm not sure where to post this.
Anyway, we are a not-for-profit that has been providing cell phones for four key employees. When the phones were issued they agreed to $10.00 per pay period to be deducted from their paychecks for personal use of the cell phone, plus to reimburse for personal calls if the package minutes are exceeded. Two of the four have routinely exceeded their portion of the package minutes, but we have not incurred expense because the other two don't come close to using theirs and the minutes are pooled.
The situation is getting out of hand, though. The contract is nearly up and I'm proposing dropping the two less used phones and implementing a new policy on reimbursement from the other two.
How many of you provide cell phones for key employees?
What is your policy regarding reimbursement for personal use? [I can certainly understand someone not wanting to carry 2
What I'm leaning towards is dividing the minutes allocated per person by the monthly cost of the phone, having the employee indicate all personal calls, and reimburse for that portion of the bill. It would fluctuate per month, but would be based upon personal usage.
Any ideas? I'd really love to get out of the cell phone business entirely, and have the two employees get their own phones and submit the business calls on an expense report, but if I can't do that I'd like to find another more equitable way to do this.

deniseE

Since you're talking about so few phones (we have probably 300 Agency-wide)...I won't share our company policy with you...but make an alternate suggestion that my son's employer uses.

He has each employees sign up for their own cell phone service, pick a plan based upon your personal use...and then he'll upgrade the plan by 20.00/month, by putting an additional 10.00 in your paycheck. This way the employer is not only NOT responsible for the telephone (but the ee is responsible under the terms of employment for having a working phone), but also not responsible for overage minutes or functions other than work (i.e. games-ringtone downloads)

just a thought...put the burden upon the ee...not you.

marc

Great idea Denise. We implemented a similar policy about a year ago, no formal written policy, just that the 4 key EEs with cell phones can select their own service and we pay $25 per month. We will reconsider the reimbursement annually to make sure the amount is fair.

We also have Cricket phones donated to us, however it is only turned on for local service and it's has coverage limitations that don't work for all our locations - that service has obvious benefits from an administrative standpoint for many of our EEs, but does not work at all for the four key EEs. The $25 is added into the payroll system and keyed as non-taxable. Very painless.

Dr_Steve

Marc - you may want to double check on the tax status of the mobile phone allowance. If given in the form of an allowance (which we do as well), our tax people (municipality) have told us that it is now considered by the IRS to be a taxable benefit.

deniseE

Now THAT is frustrating!!!! If the company provided the telephone and service directly, it would not be a taxed benefit...

Any tax pros out there to explain????

karenmc

We have 15 cell phones distributed to key employees. I monitor the usage for 3 months and then pick an appropriate plan. If the employee goes over the allowed minutes, the overage is payroll deducted. We only have one employee who goes over the limit. This plan has worked well for us for 5 years.

TN HR

I'm glad we don't have these issues. We issue individuals with a need a company-paid phone. We've worked out a national/no roaming/no long distance flat rate with Verizon of $75/month per phone.

As an aletrnative, if an employee already has a phone and they prefer to keep it so as to not lug around two phones, we give them an allowance equal to our cost ($75).

Gene

lynn2008

We started a similar process with sales and some executives through Sprint, but each is a separate account. Our charges are similar and it is a positive benefit for authorized personnel.

One legal advantage of having them use company phones for business is you have better control over the employees behavior and misbehavior and enforcing your various electronic communications policies.

Ethel

We provide company cell phones to Execs and sales personnel -- no cost to them. We will only consider company provided phones because if a sales person leaves our employment, we still own the phone number. This is VERY important to us, because we don't want our customers trying to call our company and instead reaching x-employees. Not a positive thing in the competitive sales environment.