Most employees unhappy with reimbursements: survey

Tax benefits work as a tool for employee motivation, yet one in four employees did not understand tax-saving possibilities through the benefits offered, said a survey conducted by Zeta jointly with Nielsen.

Zeta is a fintech startup that offers digitised enterprise solutions for employee tax benefits, automated cafeterias and digital payments.

Employees surveyed included those who have worked in the company for at least two years and were eligible to receive tax-saving reimbursements. A total of 1,233 employees were interviewed in this survey. A total of 194 companies from the manufacturing and service sectors were covered in the survey.

Among the tax benefits offered the popular ones were: reimbursement for telephone or mobile (73%), fuel (52%) LTA (48%) and gadget (30%). The less popular benefits were meal (19%) and gifts (15%).

Only 6% of the companies used a fully digital process for managing reimbursements. More than 66% of the companies felt that the cost and time spent on administering the tax benefits exceeded the actual benefits to employees. Similarly, 62% of employees said the process to claim reimbursement was time consuming. In fact, more than half the employees surveyed, that is 56%, opted out of the reimbursement for higher in-hand salary, the study said.

Speaking about the survey, Ramki Gaddipati, co-founder and chief technology officer, Zeta said, “Due to the complex time-consuming paperwork, many employees prefer to opt out of the benefit because they are not able to derive a value for the benefit. The lack of digitisation is an area of concern.”