Deducting Prostitutes Doesn’t Work Well (Nor Does Deducting Porn)

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stevens famously uttered about pornography, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it….” That’s a subject matter that rarely gets to the Tax Court, but it did earlier this week.

William Halby, a 78-year old tax attorney from New York, attempted to deduct his visits to prostitutes and his pornography purchases as medical expenses. The Tax Court was having none of that. Besides the obvious dubious nature of the deduction, there is no deduction allowed for illegal activities and prostitution is illegal in New York.

Hat Tip: April15.com and Roth Tax Updates.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Tax Court. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Deducting Prostitutes Doesn’t Work Well (Nor Does Deducting Porn)”

  1. Jeff says:
    September 16, 2009 at 7:08 pm

    Interesting comment above: there is no deduction allowed for illegal activities…”

    Therefore there is no deduction legally allowed for any expenses for any of the illegal immigrants.

    Therefore the damocrats could stop the illegal immigrant issues by just having the IRS disallow all tax returns that have expenses (wages or contract labor) to anyone that did not provide a legal I-9 form.

    Jeff Day EA

    Evansville, IN