{"id":1161,"date":"2008-08-26T00:35:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-26T07:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/08\/26\/punchline-of-the-week\/"},"modified":"2008-08-26T00:35:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-26T07:35:00","slug":"punchline-of-the-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/08\/26\/punchline-of-the-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Punchline of the Week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From a professional CPA&#8217;s web page detailing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kathyscottcpa.com\/court_cases.html\">Court Cases Regarding Hobbies and\/or Businesses<\/a>&#8211;specifically, what income tax deductions the IRS will allow:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">WRITING WINNER WHILE LOSING:<\/span> Taxpayer was not allowed to deduct some of his &#8220;research expenses&#8221; relating to his writing activities. He paid to have his book published, which it was. However he had a loss from his writing business. The Tax Court, and the Fourth Circuit, ruled against the IRS in determining that he did in fact have a profit motive. In spite of the recreational aspect of his writing, the court concluded &#8220;these factors were outweighed by the business-like manner of his recordkeeping, the diligence of his marketing, and the start-up nature of his losses.&#8221; Unfortunately, his largest deductions were disallowed because they were &#8220;so personal in nature as to preclude their deductibility.&#8221; He wrote about prostitution. <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">(Vitale, T.C. Memo 1999-131)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And, because you know I love primary sources, here&#8217;s the complete text of <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Tax Court Memorandum 1999-131<\/span> in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ustaxcourt.gov\/InOpHistoric\/VITALE.TCM.WPD.pdf\">PDF<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/law.onecle.com\/tax\/1999\/vitale.tcm.wpd01.html\">HTML<\/a>.  It&#8217;s also worth reading the court document to get the details of how this poor sap was scammed by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfwa.org\/Beware\/cases.html#Northwest\">Northwest Publishing<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>~CKL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From a professional CPA&#8217;s web page detailing Court Cases Regarding Hobbies and\/or Businesses&#8211;specifically, what income tax deductions the IRS will allow: WRITING WINNER WHILE LOSING: Taxpayer was not allowed to deduct some of his &#8220;research expenses&#8221; relating to his writing&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}