The New and *Imporved FSA

One of the perks (perquisites being the original word) of this new job is the Vice and Virtue Flexible Spending Account, also known as a VVFSA or, popularly, a Sinning and Sainting FSA. We all get one. No other employer in the country (maybe the world) offers a VVFSA. They’re still working out some of the kinks of this innovation. As best as I can tell, this is how it works:

• Each employee starts with 1,000 Metaphysical Points (MPs) in their account.

• As with a stock exchange, the account value rises or falls in accordance with supply and demand. In this case, punishment and reward or good or bad are central to the algorithim.

• In any given calendar year, one’s account grows or diminishes in value as a result of the employee's contributed positive or negative impacts as determined by Human Resources (HR). (As of this writing, the impacts are confined both to the workspace and the hours of employment. However, remote work during the Coronavirus Pandemic has blurred these lines, and discussions are under way to amend the plan’s parameters.)

• Each employee is given a personal customized, confidential list of Positive Impacts (PIs) and Negative Impacts (NIs) at the end of each calendar year as an MP scoring sheet for the forthcoming year.

• The so-called cafeteria plan component of the Vice and Virtue FSA enables adherents to select in advance which impacts to be assigned a weighted value or which impacts to delete altogether in considering the MP annual total.

• The FSA essentially enables individuals to be reimbursed for virtues and charged for nonreimbursable vices as defined by HR.

• The “use it or lose it” feature of the VVFSA means that all 1,000 Metaphysical Points must be either spent during the calendar year or lost in perpetuity. The MPs can’t be rolled over into the next year.

• At year’s end, if an individual’s MP total is in arrears (e.g., in a state of moral depravity, beneath contempt, heinously solipsistic, Trumpian, egregiously GOP, sociopathically successful inter alia), HR will schedule an exit conference in the Tomas de Torquemada Conference Room in the sub-basement.