Barking Dogs
If you’re a consultant and work from home, you better hope that your neighbors are silent, otherwise what happened to this woman might happen to you!
The self-employed consultant alleged that barking dogs and faulty constructions were disrupting her work, so she sued her neighbors. In the meantime, she was also charged with a criminal misdemeanor. What did she do? She deducted $26,000 of attorney fees associated with BOTH of these proceedings. The IRS, of course, was not so pleased and said that the legal fees were personal costs.
In the end, the Tax Court agreed with her since she used 50% of her condo for business while the IRS could not prove that the noise didn’t negatively affect her business.
