What You Should Know About Guards Using Their Own Phones

Q: Do you have to reimburse officers for using personal phones for work?

In California, Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service (2014) and Labor Code Section 2802 established that employers must reimburse a reasonable percentage of the bill for work-related use, regardless of whether the employee has an unlimited plan. Other jurisdictions have their own expense reimbursement provisions, and the landscape has continued to develop since 2014, so confirm your specific obligations with your own counsel rather than relying on a general rule.

Trackforce

April 5, 2016 · 11 min read

Security guard using a personal phone under a BYOD policy

In August 2014, California’s Second District Court of Appeal ruled in Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service that companies with employees in California must reimburse their employees for work-related voice calls on their personal cellphones.

California Labor Code Section 2802 requires the employer to reimburse employees for necessary business expenses. Whether the employee has unlimited or limited minutes, the employee is owed a reasonable percentage of their cellphone bill.

California was the case that put this on everyone’s radar, but it is no longer the only jurisdiction with expense reimbursement obligations, and the position has continued to move since 2014. If you operate across state lines, confirm your obligations state by state with your own employment counsel rather than assuming one rule applies everywhere. Nothing here is legal advice.

Key takeaways

BYOD is not the free option.
It shifts cost from hardware to reimbursement, administration and legal exposure. Cheaper up front, rarely cheaper to run badly.
Reimbursement obligations vary by state and keep changing.
California is the best-known case, not the whole picture. Check each state you operate in with your own counsel.
Write the policy before the first officer uses a personal phone.
It belongs in onboarding paperwork, not in a conversation after something goes wrong.
Offboarding is the part nobody plans.
When an officer leaves, your client data is on a device you do not own and cannot wipe.
Predictable app data usage makes reimbursement calculable.
Knowing roughly what the guard app consumes per shift turns a vague allowance into a defensible number.

Industry surveys from the mid-2010s found that a majority of US information workers were paying their entire mobile phone bill, including data, for phones they also used for work. Treat that as historical context rather than a current figure, but the underlying dynamic has not changed: personal devices quietly subsidise a lot of business activity.

With many security firms requiring officers to use their own devices, it is a smart idea to formalize your BYOD policy, and probably a reasonable reimbursement plan alongside it.

If you are going to require employees to use their own devices for work, it should be a formal part of your hiring process, including onboarding paperwork and program. Keeping that documentation attached to the officer record in people management means you can show what each person signed and when. You will also want to consult with the company lawyer to ensure all of your bases are covered.

While the California ruling focused narrowly on reimbursement for cellphone minutes, later disputes in this area have extended to other technology expenses such as data plans, home internet, software and file sharing services.

Things to consider when formalizing a BYOD plan

What devices will the policy include (cellphone, laptop, tablet, etc.)?
What kind of service plans do your employees currently have?
What risks would a BYOD plan present to your business?
How will personal devices be secured?
How will the reasonable reimbursement be calculated?

Lawrence Borgens of Delta Protective Services, a Silvertrac customer at the time, met California compliance requirements by folding cellphone reimbursement payments into the Uniform Maintenance Allowance, which kept it non-taxable. Worth confirming that treatment with your own accountant, since tax treatment depends on how the allowance is structured.

What made it workable was predictability. Because guard management software uses a known, modest amount of data per shift, he could forecast the consumption the app would require and therefore plan the monthly reimbursement. Silvertrac is now part of Trackforce, and that capability sits in TrackTik today.

BYOD versus company-issued devices

The decision usually gets made on up-front cost alone, which is the one column where BYOD always wins. Here is the fuller comparison, because several of the other rows cost real money later:

Consideration	Officers use their own phones (BYOD)	You issue company devices
Up-front cost	Near zero, which is why most firms start here	Hardware plus a plan per officer, paid before the contract earns anything
Ongoing cost	A reimbursement you have to calculate, justify and keep current	Predictable per-line billing, and you own the depreciation
Adoption	Fast. Officers already know the device and keep it charged	Slower. A second device gets forgotten, left in a car or not charged
Control	Limited. You cannot wipe, lock or standardise a device you do not own	Full. You set the OS version, the apps and the lock policy
Data and privacy	Complicated. Company data sits on a personal device alongside personal data	Clean separation, which matters most if an incident ever goes to litigation
Offboarding	The awkward one. An officer leaves with your data on their phone	Device comes back, access ends the same day
Legal exposure	Reimbursement obligations vary by state and change over time	Largely avoided, since the officer bears no personal cost

There is no universally right answer. Smaller firms and fast-growing ones tend to start with BYOD because the alternative is unaffordable. Firms with litigation exposure, high turnover, or clients who ask about data handling tend to move to company devices at some point. Many end up running a hybrid: personal phones for routine posts, issued devices for sensitive sites and mobile patrol vehicles.

What a BYOD policy actually needs to cover

A one-line clause in the handbook is not a policy. These are the clauses that matter when something goes wrong:

Which devices and which apps. Name them. “Work-related use” is too vague to enforce or to reimburse against.
The reimbursement method and amount. A flat monthly stipend is easier to administer than percentage-of-bill, and easier to defend because it is consistent across officers.
Minimum device requirements. A supported OS version and a working camera, since an officer whose phone cannot run the app or take a usable photo cannot do the job.
Screen lock and passcode expectations. Client data on an unlocked phone is the single biggest practical risk in a BYOD setup.
What happens to data when they leave. Decide now whether you can revoke app access remotely, and confirm that removing access also removes cached client data.
What you can and cannot see. Be explicit that location tracking applies to shift hours and to the app only. Officers assume the worst otherwise, and that assumption is what kills adoption.
Who pays for damage. A phone broken on shift is a conversation worth having in writing beforehand rather than in the moment.

Rolling out BYOD without a dispute

Get the policy reviewed before you launch it. Employment counsel in every state you operate in, not just your home state. This is the step firms skip and the one that costs the most to skip.
Measure actual data usage on a few phones first. Run the app on three or four officers’ devices for a month. You now have a real number to build the stipend on instead of a guess.
Lead with what officers get, not what you need. One less device to carry and charge, and a phone they already know how to use. The safety features on the app are a stronger argument than the compliance ones.
Put it in onboarding, and re-sign existing staff. New hires are easy. The risk sits with the officers who have been using personal phones informally for years with nothing on file.
Review the stipend annually. An allowance set once and never revisited is how a reasonable reimbursement quietly becomes an unreasonable one.

The pros and cons

Of course, there are many pros and cons that must be considered in order to create a formalized BYOD plan that fits your business. The first thing to consider is whether a BYOD plan is right for your company and its employees at all.

On the upside, employees get to use their own devices, which means they know how to use them and will probably take better care of them. It is also one less item they have to charge and remember to bring to work.

Even with a reimbursement plan, BYOD still offers real financial benefits for employers, although the security and data risks need managing rather than ignoring. For the wider view there are BYOD best practices for physical security, and if you decide to issue hardware instead it is worth looking at durable smartphones built for field use.

Whichever route you take, the device only matters because of what runs on it. Officers filing incident reports in-tour, scanning checkpoints and carrying lone worker protection is the point of putting an app in their hand in the first place.

Still weighing the BYOD model? Book a TrackTik demo and we can walk through what the app needs from a device and help you put a defensible number on the reimbursement for your own operation.

Frequently Asked Questions

In many places yes, but requiring it is what creates the reimbursement question, and the rules differ by jurisdiction and change over time. If you are going to require it, put it in writing as part of onboarding rather than treating it as an informal expectation, and have the policy reviewed by employment counsel for every state you operate in. This article is general guidance, not legal advice.

In California, Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service (2014) and Labor Code Section 2802 established that employers must reimburse a reasonable percentage of the bill for work-related use, regardless of whether the employee has an unlimited plan. Other jurisdictions have their own expense reimbursement provisions, and the landscape has continued to develop since 2014, so confirm your specific obligations with your own counsel rather than relying on a general rule.

A flat monthly stipend is usually easier to administer and easier to defend than calculating a percentage of each officer’s bill, because it is consistent across the workforce. Base it on something real: run the app on a few officers’ phones for a month, measure actual data consumption, and build from there. Then review it annually, since an allowance set once and forgotten is how a reasonable figure becomes an unreasonable one.

Four, in rough order of likelihood. Client data sitting on an unlocked personal phone. Inconsistent devices, where an officer’s phone cannot run the app or take a usable photo. No ability to revoke access or wipe data when someone leaves. And officers assuming you can see more than you can, which quietly kills adoption. The first and third are the ones that matter if an incident ever reaches litigation.

This is the question most BYOD policies fail to answer. Work out in advance whether you can revoke app access remotely and whether removing access also clears cached data from the device. Make it an explicit offboarding step with a named owner, alongside collecting keys and uniforms. On a company-issued device the problem largely disappears, which is one of the stronger arguments for issuing hardware at sensitive sites.

Cheaper to start, not always cheaper to run. BYOD removes hardware and plan costs but adds reimbursement, the administration of calculating and defending it, and legal exposure that varies by state. Company devices cost more up front and give you control over the OS, the lock policy and offboarding. A lot of firms end up with a hybrid: personal phones for routine posts, issued devices for high-sensitivity sites and patrol vehicles.

Less than most people expect, because the heavy items are photos and video rather than the app itself. That predictability is what makes a stipend calculable, and it is how firms have historically satisfied reimbursement requirements without guessing. The honest way to find your own number is to measure it: run the guard app on a few devices across a normal month, including a site with heavy incident reporting. You can book a TrackTik demo and we can talk through what to expect for your site mix.