Can you use the Daschle "I forgot" rule?
“Can you use the Daschle “I forgot” rule?”
Heh. You can try any excuse you want, Timmy’s or Tommy’s, but the IRS agent auditing you will have heard that line 4,172 times by the time he gets to you, and it probably won’t be taken as funny.
ON the serious side, the HO deduction is dangerous because (in an audit) it is SO easy to torpedo, and it’s used by all manner of twerps and their twerpy home businesses, so it attracts excess IRS scrutiny. It really just depends upon how much trouble you wish to expose yourself to and how much an agent wants to make you hate life...and that, frankly, is a risk/reward scenario NO serious businessperson would rationally take on. Once you have a business that makes the deduction worth it...you shouldn’t jeopardize your biz with such an easily shot-down effort. IMO, of course. I am sure there are some happy basketweavers somewhere who’ve been successfully using it for years, but it’s a time bomb. The bottom line realization is that you make more money simply by not paying rent elsewhere than you do by claiming the proportionate use of vacuum-cleaner bags for your office.
I used to live in a house in North Hollywood, CA, my first house, classic 1946 war box, where I had a video equipment business in one bedroom, a computer equip biz in the illegally added-on (not by me) den, and rented the 2-car detached garage (which I had fixed up as a music studio) to a drummer for practice, and had a roommate (in the den) whose rent I reduced when the computer biz took half his space. The 2 businesses together grossed about $1 million a year. LOL, there was hardly a square foot of that house that wasn’t some kind of moneymaking something or other. Ahhh, the 80’s. Loved ‘em.