Professors' Home Office Expenses: A Recent Development.

Abstract Professors maintain an office in their homes for a variety of reasons. In some cases, the home office enables them to accomplish better the academic responsibilities associated with their employment, such as scholarly research or classroom preparation. The home office also may be used in connection with outside activities which provide an additional source of income, such as textbook writing or consulting. This article assesses the impact of Bodzin v. Comm. on the right of a professor to deduct home office expenses for income tax purposes and offers suggestions for sustaining the deduction in view of this more restrictive judicial environment. The cost of a home, including its maintenance, is normally a nondeductible expenditure. However, if a taxpayer uses a part of the home as a place of business, a portion of these costs are deductible as a business expense. Expenses of maintaining a home office must be ordinary and necessary business expenses to be deductible for income tax purposes. The principal source of conflict between taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on the deduction of these expenses has centered on the interpretation of "necessary." The IRS has attempted to use the employer mandate test in support of their position that home office expenses are not necessary business expenses.