Policy

IRS Eyes Taxes on Tech Firms' Free Lunches

Why should anybody be happy at work?

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There's no free lunch, goes the old saying. The IRS may take that literally.

The Internal Revenue Service is looking into the "free lunches" that companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley heavyweights provide to their employees, and whether those meals should be subject to taxation.

"It appears for a lot of these companies that they're not actually including (them) in their employees paychecks or W-2s and therefore the question is whether there's some skirting of the tax laws," Mark said this morning on the Markets Hub. Needless to say, this development won't be welcome in the Valley, where the sumptuous workplace cafeterias are an ingrained part of the culture.