Free food is such a staple of Startupland that when Marissa Mayer introduced free food to Yahoo, she was heralded like Moses stepping down from Mt. Sinai, stone tablets in hand. But the Wall Street Journal reports that all that gratis grub could land tech companies in trouble with the IRS.
That’s because, to the enforcers in Washington, these perks look an awful lot like another form of compensation, and the IRS often considers regular meals a taxable benefit.