Sales compensation plan: travel bonus

[Alex Abda]

Hi All, my first ever question here is as follows:
To stimulate sales, we announce so called competitions, i.e. short-term individual and team sales targets that are remunerated with a nonmonetary bonus in the form of travel tickets offered free of charge or subject to a discount. Tickets may be replaced with products expressed in a dollar value if an agent chooses not to travel.
It is clear when tickets are 100% free - we just pay personal income tax calculated from the cost of tickets.
Questions arise where agents pay a certain % of ticket's price at their own cost. This is like this: we book and pay for tickets, winners fly to spend a week or so overseas, after their return we draw their share of ticket price from commisions payable to them in a number of instalments, say 3 to 6, over several months until paid in full. Thus, technically we recharge tickets to recover part of our expenses.

 

[Alex Abda]

So far, we have posted tickets as our commissions expense and reported ticket instalments by sales folks as our other operating income (taxable income). However, recently we realized that ticket instalments collected as described above can actually be viewed as pure recharge, i.e. no income arises and no tax is due. What options are there to treat this sort of transaction? Is it acceptable to handle ticket instalments as rebilled amounts?