Can I get a raise in my allowance?

You may remember that they're changing part of my Special Ops Engineering reimbursement package. Something about cars, miles driven, government compliance standards, and getting paid less.

I love the getting paid less part.

I voiced my undying love of the getting paid less part at the regional meeting, and was told that the intent was not to pay us less. In fact, some people should be making more.

According to their math, I should be making more.

(PS: They're crazy.)

So December comes around, we report our mileage like good monkeys, and our January disbursement is calculated. Somebody somewhere is making more money, according to the higher-ups. Nobody at my house is making more money.

In fact, what was once ~$540 per paycheck (bi-weekly) is now ~$490 per month. Wave your hands, do the tax-withholding dance, and it sorts out to... less per month. Which multiplies by twelve for a total of less per year.

Armed with rudimentary math, and a firm understanding of my tax bracket not falling anywhere near the 50+% range, I wrote our HR manager a nice email. Complete with math. And supporting documents.

I held back on the graphs, though.

HR forwarded my complaint to the top of our US reporting structure (which made me glad I'd attached those supporting documents, and scaled back the I-hate-this-program rhetoric to mild displeasure), who then called me this morning to chat.

And re-affirmed my faith in our senior management. I was told, again, that the point is not to pay us less. And we found out which bad assumption drove my compensation into the ground. Someone thought I'd be driving 16K miles for work this year, like I did my rookie year. Except that I'm dedicated to one site for the forseeable future, and that site is 8 miles from home. 10 if I go the long way around.

Maybe if I drove to TJ on my way to work every morning I could hit that 16K mark.

The plan is to sit tight and suck up the pay cut for the next two months on the understanding that they will reevaluate the program in March. For those of us who currently find our reimbursements lacking, there will be profile changes and possibly line item gross ups. From what I've heard, these will be retro-active as well.

Oddly enough, I learned the phrase gross up last night while listening to NPR. Somebody who's been appointed to something used to work for IMF, and they don't withhold US Taxes, so his paycheck was "grossed up" to cover the employer's half of US Taxes... which he was supposed to pay when he filed as self-employed.

Except he didn't.

I hope our gross up doesn't come with an audit and tax complications, and possible disqualification from future consideration for public office. One of my new life goals is to never have my IRS situation discussed/debated on a national public broadcast medium.

There's many reasons why I'm unhappy with Special Ops Engineering at the moment, but I can't honestly say that our senior management is a collection of blood-sucking vampires, or company men. When our number one calls, talks to me about my individual circumstances, and sets out a path toward mutual resolution, I pretty much have to accept that they're humans doing the best they can.

This rules out channeling [GM]Dave and feeding anyone to a purple dragon.

I was looking forward to that part of this paycut, too.

I guess I'll have to go back to hoping that Godzilla breaks in, stomps my robot to the ground, and makes a feature-length film about it for everyone's amusement (and profit!).