Greg,
If you continue to take money from a company that you are at philosophical odds with, and are unable to change the behavior of the management, then you are a chump. If you’re so badly mistreated there, why do you stay? Is it because you are pathologically unable to accept defeat? If the industry is so corrupt, and in such flagrant violation of federal law as you so boldly assert, why then hasn’t the industry changed? Surely, someone, somewhere must have the intellectual resources to effect change. The entire food service industry runs on the backs of people who aren’t particularly well paid, but for some unusual reason, it never changes, and there is no shortage of employees.
The US General Services Administration maintains a reimbursement rate of 58.5 cents per mile for a privately owned vehicle being used by a Federal employee. Most pizza drivers I know don’t fall into that category, myself included. If you follow the guidelines as laid out in IRS publication 917, YOU need to keep records. The $.55 per mile reimbursement isn’t allowed if you claim a “section 179 deduction.” Furthermore, you can’t claim depreciation if you are using your car. According to the IRS (and the DOL defers to the IRS as an enforcer,) a car is defined as follows:
"For depreciation purposes, a car is any four-wheeled vehicle (including a truck or van) that is made primarily for use on public streets, roads, and highways. Its unloaded gross vehicle weight must not be more than 6,000 pounds. A car includes any part, component, or other item that is physically attached to it or is usually included in the purchase price.
A car does not include:
- An ambulance, hearse, or combination ambulance-hearse used directly in a business,
* A vehicle used directly in the business of transporting persons or property for pay or hire, or
- A truck or van that is a qualified nonpersonal use vehicle."
If you’re attempting to double dip the system, you’re in violation of IRS statutes. For what it’s worth, that 1,600 page
Department of Labor Field Operations Handbook you cling to so tenaciously is a very big book filled with lots of information that is at direct odds with the Internal Revenue Service.
My advice to you would be to quit your job, become a Labor Lawyer, and seek to singlehandedly rectify, clarify, maintain, and uphold all of these spaghetti-esque laws. I’m betting you won’t. The system has rumbled on the way it has for years simply because the interpretation of the laws is murky at best. Since I’m fairly compensated, and my drivers are fairly compensated, I don’t get in a twist about these issues. You, on the other hand, are still in a dither. I could disappear from these boards, come back in 5 or 10 years, and I’d expect to find you here, issues unresolved, still yammering about a situation that has no clear delineation, then I’d ask, “Still tilting at windmills Don Quixote?”