Level 5

home office deduction and the auto expneses/mileage on your schedule C

Forum|Forum|2 months ago
March 27, 2026
3 replies
0 views

Good afternoon,

Dumb question, I understand it it allowable to take both the home office deduction and the auto expneses/mileage expenses on your schedule C, but is this a red flag for?

Can anyone advise if this is an unwise practice?

Thanks!

IRonMaN

Level 15

If the client actually uses a portion of their home exclusively for business and has a log to document mileage, why would you be worried about potential red flags? As long as I was comfortable with the client providing accurate information, I wouldn't worry about potential red flags or if the deductions even generated fireworks, I would take the deductions.

Slava Ukraini!

P

PPECPAAuthor

Level 5

Thanks Ironman! Much appreciated.

IRonMaN

Level 15

You betcha!

Slava Ukraini!

Skylane

Intuit Community Champion

Agree with @IRonMaN , we are preparers not auditors. If it’s reasonable and consistent with the business I allow it….

Health care worker just gave me 20k expenses against 8k NEC income… medical conference in Hawaii, licenses, insurance, meals, etc… receipts for everything….

She also had 250k in W2 income in same industry… i did the math and allowed the % of expenses to the % of income. Is it 100% correct? Probably not… is it reasonable? I think so.

If at first you don’t succeed…..find a workaround

BobKamman

Level 15

The red flag that taxpayers should watch out for . .

Are preparers who talk about "red flags" for audit.

These exist only in the imagination of uninformed journalists and the people they seem to have a knack for quoting.

Where did the expression "red flag" originate?

Back when returns were filed with the local district office and initially sorted by local employees, a "red flag" was attached to the returns of other IRS employees, because they received additional scrutiny.

Taxprohere

Level 7

Having a home office will strengthen the position of business-related mileage, establishing business location to business location travel.

This may be a good topic for opinions: can you have local business mileage if your home is principal place of business but fails the exclusive test for home office?

T

TaxGuyBill

Level 15

@Taxprohere wrote:

This may be a good topic for opinions: can you have local business mileage if your home is principal place of business but fails the exclusive test for home office?

From a non-home business location to another non-home business location, yes. But I suspect you are asking about home to business purpose and the business purpose back to home.

The way I personally interpret it, as long as the Home meets the definition of "Principal Place of Business", REGARDLESS if it is used exclusively or not, the miles should qualify.

However, at least one Tax Court judge views it differently than the way I interpret it. Although this was NOT part of what was actually being 'ruled' on, there is at least on Tax Court case that casually mentions that because the Home Office was not used exclusively for business, the miles to and from home are NOT deductible.

Sign up

Login with SSO

Let's get you signed in

Login with SSO

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded