Bad news from the IRS for all you work-at-home types. Deducting your bathroom as a "home office" might not work:
Petitioner used one of the bedrooms of his residence exclusively as his office for his accounting business. Petitioner argued that he also used the hallway and the bathroom adjacent to this bedroom exclusively for his accounting business. Petitioner testified, however, that his children and other personal guests occasionally used the bathroom. Accordingly, the hallway and the bathroom were not used exclusively for business purposes. ...
Guess this means I'll have to rethink my plan to count reading the newspaper in the bathroom as "work-related research." By the way, all of you who might be happy about the prospect of the end of dead-tree newspapers. Reading on a laptop in the bathroom (even if its a tablet or a netbook) isn't the same. There's just something aesthetically of
Comments
Bathroom humor aside, this points out soooo clearly how asinine our whole federal tax system really is. Just the fact this guy is spending his time (which is considerable when filing yourself as self employed) and an agency is responding, investigating, clarifying, etc is testimony to one huge waste of fricking time money and resources. Over 70,000 pages of IRS regs, but neither side of the political legislature can make a case for reducing the size of government?
Flat tax.
Leo & Tim:
Oh, the stories I can tell from dealing with people who WILL indeed take ANY (fraudulent) deduction they CAN when I was working for the Treasury Dept...
(blood would shoot from your eyes)
I'd up & abolish the damn agancy...flat tax for all.
Nice, coming from a former employee, huh?
;)
This guy is in tax court, Tim, because he's a cheat. Ain't no tax flatter than the excise tax on cigarettes and liquor, but people get prosecuted all the time for cheating on those taxes.
Reading the newspaper in the car is dangerous, Leo. You need to
take both hands off the wheel to turn the pages. Broadsheets have shrunk from 34" wide to 28" wide since 1970, easing that problem, but it's better yet on the Kindle.
The tax code is different from tax regulations. Congress writes code without much in the way of guidance. The IRS then writes regulations interpreting the code. My experience with the IRS over 24 years is that they fail to learn and waste money. Even when you have a judge writes a ruling in your favor, they continue to do the same stupid thing year after year. The worse part of it is, the IRS conceded 10 seconds before trial began.
The IRS has a difficult time understanding that a regulation may not contradict the plain and literal language of a statue given it by congress. Courts generally assume that congress uses common words in their popular meanings.
The IRS is like the "kudzu vine."