Ok sorry my fault.. right i work in sales and i cover the country from my home in dublin. In order for me to be in the right bik revenue bracket i must keep the business mileage up high as possible.. basically i have been told that my house is not my primary place of work as the office is 30km away, but i dont work there .. i do all my work either in the car or at home, but very rarely in the actual office. The company claims that when i leave my house that the distance to the office must be taken from my first call and the same principal applies when i return home. I lose 60km a day which works in the region 15k personnal mileage PA. this seems wholy unfair and i wanted to get some advice on this, if its correct?
I think I understand what your employer's getting at here.
For the purposes of paying tax-free subsistence (and travel expenses if they applied - which they don't because they've provided you with a car), the relevant Revenue concession (and the civil service expense regime from which it is derived) states:
"A ‘travelling appointment’ is one where either: a) an employee is required to travel in the course of her/his job (for example, an occupation which generally involves multiple daily appointments with customers - travelling salesperson, travelling repairperson, service engineers, etc.-); or b) travelling is an integral part of the job (for example, bus driver, lorry driver, coach driver, van driver).
The reimbursement of expenses by the employer to such an employee is generally only in relation to subsistence but may sometimes include expenses of travelling where an office holder or employee is required to use her/his own car on a business journey.
Where an individual whose job can be categorised as a ‘travelling appointment’ would not otherwise be regarded as having a ‘normal place of work’ for the purposes of computing travel and subsistence expenses for this category of worker, her/his employer’s base will be regarded as her/his normal place of work.
Where a business journey commences from the employee’s home or the employee returns directly to home, then the expenses of travel and subsistence that may be reimbursed without deduction of tax are the lesser of those incurred on the journey between: a) home and the temporary work location; or b) the employer’s base (normal place of work) and the temporary work location."
I think it is in the context of the underlined rules that your employer is looking at what constitutes business mileage for BIK purposes, albeit that the above relates specifically to travel & subsistence expense payments.
The rationale for the above is that when an individual travels from their home to their normal place of work that is not a business journey, it is simply their commute, and therefore they don't get a tax deduction for it.
"Business use" is defined in section 121 of the Taxes Consolidation Act, 1997, as "travelling in the car which that person is necessarily obliged to do in the performance of the duties of his or her employment". If you have been given a car by your employer and told that you have to keep it at home and use it for travelling to all your appointments, then your journey is "business use" as soon as you hit the road from your house. The mental gymnastics / arithmetic exercise that needs to be undertaken in respect of mileage expenses does not apply in the case of a person having a company car, since what needs to be measured and accounted for is the actual business mileage. It is acknowledged that a "travelling appointment" such as yourself doesn't actually have a normal place of work, so for a specific purpose (payments of expenses) the employer's base will be regarded as the normal place of work, but that is not stated anywhere in relation to the application of BIK rules.
It's important to note, however, that if you had to call to the office in the morning on your way to the customer, and/or call to the office on the return home in the evening, then that would be different. The first and final legs of the journey in that case would arguably just be you travelling from home to work and vice versa, and the 30km would become private use in that case.
The fallback position in relation to BIK is worth noting however; which is, where Revenue are not satisfied with the records maintained in respect of the use of a car, they simply deduct 8,000kms from the total annual mileage, as relating to the private use, and the balance will be treated as business kilometres and the BIK band determined accordingly. So, if your employer is currently insisting on reducing your business mileage by 30kms x 2 x a couple of hundred days a year, regardless of where you actually travelled on a given day, they are probably inflating the private use / deflating the business use by several thousand kms more than Revenue ever would in an audit.