It seems as if, in this day and age, we are seeing more and more stories about employers who refuse to act in good faith – and this is one of them.
OP lives a good distance from his job. Instead of putting the miles on his car he decided to take the train, then the subway. He figured that the train pass was about the same as gas, so that all washed out.
A few years ago, I was working in Downtown Los Angeles, but living in San Diego. For those of you who don’t know, that’s over 175-mile per day commute.
I wasn’t about to put my car through that, and so I took the train every morning to Union Station, then backtracked via Subway to the jobsite.
His contract included a parking allowance, though, so he asked his boss if he could get his subway fees covered instead, since he didn’t drive.
The boss said nope.
The cost of the Amtrak weekly pass was basically the same price of gas, but I thought I’d try to get that extra $3.50/d from the subway covered since I wasn’t using the “parking reimbursement” in my contract.
The $17.50 per week wasn’t going to bankrupt me, but I figured I’d try.
Came to the boss and asked, basically, “Since I’m not driving to work and getting reimbursed for parking at $10, could I submit my subway receipts at $3.50 and get that covered?” And was told to pound sand.
The way the parking allowance worked was that people submitted their stubs from the parking garage every day, then got reimbursed in their paycheck the following week.
Now, the way the reimbursement worked was that you pulled a parking slip when you got to work and paid it at the end of the day.
Then, on mondays, you would submit all 5 parking slips from the previous week, and the $50 would be added to your paycheck (untaxed, obviously).
So, OP started pulling tickets and turning them in.
So, every day from then on, when I took the train into work, I just walked into the parking structure and pulled a ticket.
I didn’t have a vehicle and so I didn’t need to worry about paying for the ticket to leave, but the contractor didn’t know that. They didn’t have access to the system (which is why they didn’t validate everyone’s parking and skip the middle man) and as far as they knew, I was just driving in like everyone else.
Now he gets $40 more than he asked for in the first place.
tl;dr – Contractor refused to cover my $17.50/w subway toll in good faith because it wasn’t in my contract, and so they ended up paying me the $50/w reimbursement that was in my contract.
Does Reddit think he’s cheating? I bet they’ll tell him so if they do!
They say the IRS agrees.
This person thinks we need to have better education regarding local laws that affect people.
Others were stuck on the long commute.
Plenty of people chimed in about commutes being relaxing.
I agree that it would be great if the average Joe was more educated.
But I’m going to go out on a limb and say the government isn’t about to make that happen.