In order to claim a business deduction under current tax laws, you must use part of your home exclusively and regularly as either: your principal place of business, or as a place to meet or deal with patients, clients or customers in the normal course of your business. Different rules apply to claiming the home office deduction if you are an employee. For example, the regular and exclusive business use must be for the convenience of your employer.

The amount you can deduct depends on the percentage of your home that you used for business. Your deduction for certain expenses will be limited if your gross income from your business is less than your total business expenses. The computation of the deduction is fairly complicated, and the current “exclusive use” test is overly restrictive.

For that reason the American Homeowners Grassroots Alliance and a number of other organizations have called on Congress to simplify the deduction by allowing homeowners to elect to take a standard home office deduction in the amount of $1,500 for home office expenses. If you meet the basic requirements for a home office deduction, you could elect to take this standard deduction instead of doing the computations required by current law. In addition to AHGA, supporting organizations include the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE), National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), National Small Business Association (NSBA), and the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Home-based businesses account for 52 percent of all firms in our economy, and millions of homeowners do work for their employers in home offices. AHGA believes that understanding and complying with the rules for deducting home office expenses can be difficult for home-based business owners and employees with home-based offices.

Legislation to accomplish that objective has been introduced by U.S. Representatives John McHugh and Kurt Schrader. The Home Office Deduction Simplification Act (H.R. 1509) would create the alternative standard $1,500 home office deduction sought by the coalition. “We believe that this will make tax reporting a lot easier for millions of American homeowners.” said AHGA President Bruce Hahn.

The legislation must now compete for the attention of thousands of other pieces of pending legislation. Additional support will be needed to help it fight its way through the House of Representatives and receive consideration in the U.S. Senate.

You can help make that happen. Please contact your U.S. representative and ask him or her to cosponsor this legislation. You can find their email and office phone number through a link on AHGA’s home page. The link can identify the representative serving your zip code if you don’t happen to know their name. Hopefully, taking the home office deduction will be much easier next year.

The Federal Communications Commission has been charged by Congress with creating a rural broadband strategy to provide guidance for deploying federal stimulus funding for the purpose of expanding the availability and usage of broadband Internet access in rural areas. Over $7 billion dollars of stimulus funds are reserved for that purpose, and the FCC has sought public suggestions on how to most effectively spend those funds.

A large share of the nation’s 60 million rural residents are homeowners. The American Homeowners Grassroots Alliance believes this program is critical to delivering broadband services to millions of them for the first time. The process must be implemented thoughtfully, and AHGA has urged the FCC to make accurate advance needs assessment an essential criteria in the deployment of those funds.

“Rural populations are not monolithic,” AHGA told the Federal Communications Commission in its March 25 comments. “The makeup and needs of a rural population in one area can be very different than those in another area for a variety of reasons. Those needs are also changing, much more rapidly in some cases than in others.” AHGA believes it is critical to measure both the immediate and projected long term demand for broadband services in each rural area where funding is contemplated. Only then will the government be able to gauge the greatest potential immediate and long term return on its investment in that rural community, and objectively compare it to other alternatives.

There is also substantial circumstantial evidence that many people in many rural areas that could greatly benefit from this new federal stimulus program are as yet unaware of its existence. There is a need to make them aware of it in order to grow support for the program in rural areas that could benefit most from broadband services, and enable local governments and organizations to provide information that is critical for accurate advance needs assessment.

A copy of AHGA’s comments is here.

BLUE GRASS, Va.—Three big helicopters flew in low and fast over Devil’s Backbone, the 4,000-foot-high Appalachian ridge that is the eastern rim of my end of Virginia’s Blue Grass Valley.

They landed soft about 8:30 on the morning of April 1 in the front pasture.

Sophie and Lucy, our two yellow Labs, barked once between them, then ducked under the porch, paws over their eyes.

Four black vans suddenly rumbled across my bridge. Forty linebackers in black shoes, black suits and shades jumped out.

Ten surrounded me as I stood next to The Cheetah, my ancient farm pickup that has found a second career as decomposing performance art. A dozen or so scoped The Cheetah for infectious diseases, unimprovised explosiveness and material defects, all of which were found a-plenty. The rest pointed automatic weapons at the five steers in the next pasture who might have been Islamic Jihadists in Black Angus clothing.

“ID,” the shadiest one demanded.

“I live here. Bub came to visit.”

He looked me up and down, from my scuffed work boots to my mended blue jeans to my gray “Oberlin Lacrosse” T-shirt now in the near-death stage of all-cotton leprosy. “You gotta be kidding.”

Bub saved me from warrantless detention. Dressed in a new denim work shirt and jeans with ironed creases, he assured the agents that I was “reasonably harmless in most circumstances.”

Bub and I climbed into The Cheetah and drove into the woods, with Lucy and Sophie in the back, barking at the convoy of shades behind us. The girls figured I had their backs. They’re nice dogs, but not bright.

We got out. “You wanna walk or work?” I asked.

“Walk and talk, maybe work later.”

“Plink?” I asked.

“Never have.”

I pulled out my rifle. Thirty linebackers buried me for a loss in my own end zone. The other 10 targeted me with stealth howitzers concealed under their suit jackets.

“Fellas,” Bub pleaded with the Secret Service. “We’re just out to enjoy the day.”

I “chiropracted” my remaining limbs back to their approximate original positions, and we started off. Sophie and Lucy blasted ahead, sniffing and poking around for dead stuff like reporters looking for vanished TARP billions.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

He laughed. “It could be worse. If we don’t get the banks acting like banks again, except better, we’ll be into temporary nationalization where we don’t want to be. Can you imagine FEMA running our 30 largest banks? Anyway, tell me what I’m looking at.”

“We’re walking on an old logging road. We cut some timber about five years ago. What do you see over there?

“An ugly pile of tree branches with a lot of thorny brambles all mixed in and around.”

“They’re tree tops -- called, slash -- from the logging. Look closer.”

He stopped. “Ah! I see four, five, six saplings, each about 10-feet tall.”

“The seedlings survive because they’re in that mess which protects them from deer. Slash also helps bunnies and that crowd.”

“Don’t diss Bambi and Thumper. My kids love ‘em.”

“Too many Bambis are bad for their habitat and themselves too. Bambis are real people, so to speak, not cartoons. That’s just the way it is.”

Bub pointed to a monster sugar maple with weightlifter limbs rising from its trunk like a hydra on hormones.

“Well, you might call that old growth,” I said. “Maybe 150 years.”

“It’s falling apart,” he said.

“Each tree species has its own life span. They’re more susceptible to breakage, insects and disease as they age, just like us. An old-growth forest around here has health problems, but we like to protect them even so. You’re looking at a mixed-age forest, heavy to maples lower down and oaks higher up.”

“So this isn’t close to wilderness, what I’m walking through?”

“No, it’s just some west-facing woods at about 3,000 feet that have been used for timber since the late 1700s. Genuine wilderness is almost impossible to find in the East.

I bring The Cheetah up here for wind sprints and to listen to my latest list of grievances and outrage.”

“What’s that stump?” he asked, pointing to a huge grey carcass with red rot inside.

“That’s what’s left of the American chestnut. See how high the stump is, about four feet. They took it down by hand with two on a crosscut saw. Probably in the late 20s. The chestnut blight fungus killed something like four billion trees. You can see it was about five feet in diameter, enormous by today’s standard for eastern hardwoods. A century ago, this hillside was thick with chestnut. So throw a few bucks into bringing it back if you want to do something for your great-grand kids.”

“Why are those trees dead?”

“They’re hemlock. A little bugger called the woolly adelgid killed them a couple of years ago. Some survived, but with a lot less green.”

“Is this a healthy forest I’m looking at?”

“It has issues. The dirt’s in good shape, and there’s little soil erosion. But the trees are vulnerable to non-native diseases and insects. The fire hazard’s pretty low, because there’s not a lot of dead wood. But remember, this would be considered a managed forest even counting that I’m the manager. The woods that are most vulnerable are the public lands, yours, in a manner of speaking, particularly aging wilderness areas.”

We stopped in front of a cut bank. “Wanna shoot?” I asked.

“You wanna get tackled again?”

“You mean you’re not going to take home a genuinely wild, totally organic, free-range, sustainably-raised-in-Nature woodchuck for Michelle’s supper?”

“She’s learned to live with many disappointments in our marriage,” he laughed. “Maybe the kids and I will plant a tree or two at the White House.”

“While you’re at it, plant a couple in a National Forest where they will be part of the country’s sustainable energy future.”

“You know what? I might like to be remembered as the first green President more than the first black President.”

“Well, you could do both.”

We walked back to the road where the shades were blaming each other for allowing POTUS to ride around with the likes of me in the likes of The Cheetah.

“I like this woods stuff,” he said.

“Next time you can drive.”

“Deal,” Bub said, as 40 shades shook their heads no.

IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs)are a useful free source for personal tax help when your tax issue cannot be handled online or by phone, and you want face-to-face tax assistance. They become very popular around April 15, and the American Homeowners Foundation advises homeowners to be first in line when their doors open in the morning unless they are willing to wait a looooooooong time to see an advisor.

Here are seven reasons to visit an IRS TAC: