Meta, a tech giant based in Los Angeles, has reportedly terminated about two dozen employees for using $25 meal vouchers purchased by the company to buy non-food household products.

The Financial Times reported last week that Meta terminated the workers after discovering that they were misusing the food credit system to purchase other household products, such as wine glasses and acne pads.

According to the report Meta employees receive daily allowances of $25 for lunch, $20 for breakfast, and $25 for dinner. This is similar to what large tech companies provide their workers as a bonus on top of standard compensation packages.

The FT, citing a source familiar with the situation, reported that Meta employees fired for abuse of the system had done so for a very long time. They would pool their money or have meals delivered to them at home when the company wanted the credits used in the office. The FT reported that employees who violated the rules for food vouchers were only reprimanded occasionally, but not fired.

The FT looked at a post made anonymously on Blind by a former Meta employee who claimed to have a salary at the tech company of around $400,000. They said that they used their $25 meal credit at Rite Aid Pharmacy for groceries such as toothpaste and tea.

According to the report, the staffer admitted in the post to having misused the credits after Meta’s Human Resources department began to investigate the practice. They were then fired without warning, calling it “surreal.”

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Meta has been restructuring in recent years. According to the FT, the tech giant will also be undergoing a new round of layoffs as well as changes within some of its departments.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced that Meta would be laying off over 11,000 employees in November 2022. He then followed up by laying off another 10,000 workers in spring 2023 in what he called the “Year of Efficiency.”

Zuckerberg claimed earlier this year that the layoffs were not due to artificial intelligence but because Meta and other tech companies had “overbuilt” during the COVID-era e-commerce boom.

“I think that across the economy, many companies overbuilt, and then when the economy recovered, things were pretty much back to the way they used to be. I think many companies realized that they were not in a great financial position because they were overbuilt. Zuckerberg said this to hosts Neal Freyman, and Toby Howell, on the podcast “Morning Brew Daily”.