[retox]

Seems incredibly self entitled to me. Why should your employer shell out money for whatever their employees decide? I don't understand it at all. What if you want to donate a controversial charity?

If you feel that strongly about a charity double your own donation.

[lukeschlather]

You seem to have this notion that employees are asking for handouts. They aren't. They're saying, "Hey, I would like a $5k raise. I know you're planning on giving it to me anyway, but I wanted to point out that if you do it in the form of charitable matching, the company will only have to reduce its income by $4700 to give me that $5k raise, since the matching is tax-deductible."

The company essentially gets to offer me more money at no cost to them if they structure their compensation this way. You could be very transparent with this and simply allow employees to direct the company to put money into charity (with the tax going to the charity instead of the government) but it's probably easier for the accountants to simply do matching with a cap, which is why you see companies do it this way.

[Cacti]

It's not everything. Usually there is a list of acceptable national charities for things like heart disease, diabetes, MS, education, poverty alleviation, etc. Chances are you'd recognize every one on the list. Sometimes employees vote on that list, sometimes it's mostly set by HR.

[mikestew]

"Usually"? My experience with companies large and small has been that if it's a 501(3)c, they're on the "list". For instance, unless you live in western WA, I guarantee the "chances" you'd "recognize" the animal shelter to which we divert our employer match is zero. Now if your chosen charity is "Whitey Uber Alles", meh, maybe it might be an issue. Don't know from experience, who's going to say "no" to an animal shelter?

It boils down to a tax write-off that allows the company to look charitable. But there's a lot of benefit along the way, so who cares of the motivation?

[retox]

I see, thanks for the insight.

[st3v3r]

Couldn't you say the same thing about any perk? "Oh, you want more vacation time? Seems incredibly self entitled to me." "Oh, you want free coffee? Seems incredibly self entitled to me."