Michael V said:

buffy said:

captain_spalding said:

Or a clever accountant.

And you have to keep a logbook. And the tax office does have auditors. I know. I was audited. They want a lot of detail.

Why do city tradies need 4WD utes? So they can bring their families here on holidays, towing their boats so they can go fishing. They drive up and down the beach. Their contact details are on the side of them.

Why do doctors want SUVs?

The deal at the hospital was that, overnight and on weekends, as part of their contracts, doctors (particularly locums) could use Qld Health vehicles for private purposes.

They had to keep the log book up to date, and they were supposed to say ‘within a reasonable radius of the hospital/town’.

They ALL ALWAYS wanted the SUVs from the fleet. Ideally, the biggest ones we had.

None of them were 4WD, but that didn’t seem to matter. As for keeping the log books, i was forever chasing them about that. As for staying within a reasonable radius: the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, and Brisbane were very popular destinations. One weekend, one of our cars was spotted in Townsville.

I had some success with the log books when i pointed out to a lot of them that the log books are tax documents, and if the ATO audited them, lack of info might lead to them paying Fringe Benefits Tax. Threaten a doctor’s money, you get their attention.

One Friday, some doctor was trying to bully my one of my staff (young woman) into giving him one of a couple of SUVs we had to hold back, for early starts on Monday.

I reminded him that the cars were available to ‘subject to operational needs’, that it was me who determined what were ‘operational needs’, and i could easily make sure that ‘operational needs’ were such that he never got an SUV again.

I got an apology from him to the staffer, and we did some shuffling and wangled an SUV for him.