Tax Tip: Is Home PC a Business Expense?

March 18 -- Just because you bought a home computer and sometimes do work on it doesn't mean you can necessarily claim it as a business expense. The IRS has strict standards.

"If you're an employee, it has to be required as a condition of employment. The employer determines you really can't properly perform your duties without the computer, but the employer isn't providing you with the equipment to do it," says Don Roberts of the Internal Revenue Service.

Roberts says the key here that you must be required to have the computer. Not that you want it to catch up with work at home, or that you want to stay one step ahead of the next day's assignments by doing some of them at home the night before.

Also more than 50 percent of the computer's use must be business-related — that means keeping the kids off it.

"It's the use of the computer. Not the time of day that it's being used that counts so, yes, if the kids are playing games on it at night, that's counting against the time that computer is being used," he says.

To ensure your computer is an allowable business deduction, you might consider buying a second PC for family use, says Roberts.