gigemhilo said:
one safe place said:
gigemhilo said:
50% of your phone bill.
Look I'm a CPA that also does audit representation. I haven't had any issue with this strategy, but you do you.
This guy is not my client but just giving general tax advice (obligatory disclaimer)
As always, it will depend on the agent and, to some degree, the nature and size of anything else they find. An arbitrary percentage, whether it be a phone bill or vehicle mileage, will not fly with some agents. Have to hope they don't ask for support of the percentage. Other agents might buy into it. I have dealt with both.
My experience has been that as long as what you do is reasonable, you provide what they ask for, you treat them with respect, "talk about their grandkids" , etc that everything goes smooth with little change in the audit.
If you try to hide things from them, act defensive, get angry, stonewall, etc - suddenly the reasonable things will no longer be reasonable.
I pretty much have had the same experience, but I had two who were direct descendants of Hitler. One of them made up numbers in their documents filed with the Tax Court and I caught it. $1.6 million became $81,000 shortly thereafter and we didn't go to court. Point is, they would be justified in disallowing anything that had no support. On the other hand, we took 100% on two vehicles on a farm, one a pickup, the other an Escalade. Had some support for the pickup, none on the Escalade, but he allowed 100% and 95%.
I had one agent who was an Army veteran and her first day in the office she noticed some of the pictures I had on my wall when my dad was in the Pacific. We spent the entire afternoon talking about military stuff, his experience, her experience. When she got up to leave, she said I can tell you right now this is going to be a no change audit. Had not looked at the first document. And it was no change.
She did ask if I would bring my dad's dog tags since the WWII ones were so different than the more recent ones.
