High cost of free breakfast

Way too often I see bean counters ruining things. The following may or may not be completely accurate, as part of it is what I heard, and part of it is my own deductions. Read with some care.

I worked briefly at Nokia in late '90s. I was essentially subcontracting; work for hire, as the company I worked for was not Nokia itself. Nevertheless, even back then it was obvious (to me) that the company culture was fairly toxic and I would not be returning after my (short) period there. For example, I was implementing some small(ish) feature to an upcoming phone, which I did, and this was then shelved because it (as I was told) would have competed with some other (more expensive, I guess) phone model.

Since this happened to be during the boom period, a lot of the work force there was like me - young people in their early twenties, many being just second to fourth year students of the nearby university or higher trade school (I am not exactly sure how education translates here, so this has to do for now.)  And like so many young engineers, they liked to work slightly odd hours - like 12 to 8 PM or so. Which understandably is a small problem for management - how do you arrange meetings when people aren't there?

So Nokia chose to offer a free breakfast for all employers, only available in the morning, before 9AM or so. The idea being that free breakfast would encourage people to come to work earlier, and thus making management so much more easier as everyone would work somewhat similar hours. Breakfast wasn't anything too fancy I think; some bread, porridge, juice - generally cheap but filling stuff.

Unfortunately this didn't last long. Someone somewhere decided that this is actually something that is called roughly taxable benefit, which means that people would have to pay taxes for the value of the food (essentially paying taxes of money they never had in the first place). This of course didn't go over too well and free breakfast was shortly gone.

Another great idea ruined by zealous accounting practices.