Meta fires employees who abused $25 meal vouchers: report

Tech giant Meta The company reportedly fired about two dozen Los Angeles-based employees for misusing the company's $25 meal vouchers to purchase non-food household items.

The Financial Times reported that Meta fired the workers last week after the company discovered that the workers were abusing its food credit system by using the funds to buy other household items, from acne pads and wine glasses to laundry detergent.

According to the report, Meta employees receive per diems of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch, and another $25 for dinner – similar perks that other major tech companies give their employees on top of their typical compensation packages.

The fired Meta employees abused the system over a long period of time, in some cases pooling their money or having meals sent to their homes even though the company intended to use the credits at the office, the Financial Times reported, citing a person is familiar with the matter. They added that workers who violated food voucher rules only occasionally received reprimands but were not fired.

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Meta has reportedly fired some employees who abused its food loan program. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

The FT reviewed a post on the anonymous messaging platform Blind in which a former Meta employee, who said he had a salary of about $400,000 at the tech giant, said he had used the platform $25 dining credit Purchase groceries such as toothpaste and tea at the Rite Aid pharmacy.

The employees said in the post that they admitted to misusing the credits when Meta's human resources department began investigating the practice and that they were later unexpectedly fired, saying it was “surreal,” they said it in the report.

FOX Business has reached out to Meta for comment.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced about 21,000 layoffs in the last two years. (Reuters/Stephen Lam / Reuters Photos)

Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – has embarked on a restructuring push in recent years, and the FT reported that the tech giant is also in the midst of a new round of layoffs and changes to some of its teams.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in November 2022 that Meta was laying off more than 11,000 workers, and then followed up with another round of layoffs affecting 10,000 workers in the spring of 2023, what it called the “Year of Efficiency.”

Earlier this year said Zuckerberg The layoffs were not due to the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), but rather because Meta, like other tech companies, had invested heavily and, as a result, “overbuilt” during the COVID-era e-commerce boom.

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“I think across the economy a lot of companies just overbuilt, and then when things got back to pretty much what they were before… I think a lot of companies realized, 'Hey, this is who we are.' “We're kind of not doing well financially because we've built too much,” Zuckerberg told hosts Neal Freyman and Toby Howell on the “Morning Brew Daily” podcast.

Daniella Genovese of FOX Business contributed to this report.