Brilliant deductions on your tax returns...

berimbau

April 15 is a thing of the past, and all responsible wage earners rushed to the post office to have that 1024 postmarked before the slide door shut us out... Now I realize I should have applied for an extension...that would have given me an extra three months to do some research and work in some deductions...Did you hear the one about the ostrich? The sperm donor? The dog food?...what deductions did you all make???

Sex and the city
Then there was the client who approached Manhattan CPA Marc Albaum about a very personal tax matter. "He had made some money being a sperm donor and wanted to know if he could take a depletion allowance," Albaum recalls. "I told him he really needed to be an oil well or something like that."

My son, my dog
Disc jockeys typically don't make much money and save even less. A few years ago, one approached Wyoming CPA Mike Lovelett for some free advice. "I've got this problem, and I'm really starting to get nervous about it," the DJ admitted. "Several years ago, I was going to owe some tax, so I put an extra deduction on my tax return." Well, reasoned Lovelett, managing director of Lovelett, Skogen & Assoc. in Casper, it couldn't be that bad. Then the DJ explained: "I put my dog on as a dependent." The radio personality had deducted his dog Red all these years, a move that meant he owed nothing to the IRS.

Fun with livestock
Back when the Society of Louisiana CPAs manned a tax hotline, few inquiries stumped them. But Al Suffrin, SLCPA's communications and public relations director, recalls one that did: "We took a call from an ostrich farmer in St. Tammany Parish who called in to find out how to go about depreciating an ostrich," he recalls. Strange as it sounds, you can depreciate an ostrich or any other livestock, as long as they're used for breeding.

Sic him, Fido
Sometimes deductions seem so logical they just have to be legal.

"I had a guy come in one time wanting to know if he could deduct the cost of his dog food. His reasoning was that his dog was security for his house, therefore the dog food became a security expense," Howard says.

from:http://www.bankrate.com/brm/itax/news/20020201a.asp[/b]