Education & Taxes:

Job-Related Training Courses

Anytime your client takes an educational course that might help them with their work or trade they might be able to write it off as a business expense.

Following are requirements for eligibility for these deductions:

• Your client needs to already be part of the working community. Your client can’t be going to college to get their education to learn a trade for the first time right out of high school.
• It must be in some way beneficial to your client’s trade or sanctioned by their employer to better or keep their job.
• The course can’t be a minimum requirement for your client’s job. They can’t take basic computer programming courses while working as a computer programmer and write those off as business expenses.
• Your client can’t take courses that prepare them for a new profession even though they might be closely related. For example, if your client is a plumber and they take a course on how to work as an electrician, that course is not tax deductible. Even though they might be able to become more versatile in their occupation.

The only thing your client has to be careful about when dealing with this tax deduction is that they are walking a fine line with the IRS. The IRS looks at these deductions with extreme scrutiny. The courses have to be directly related to your client’s profession and should not be part of the minimum requirements for their job.