Attending a conference while travelling for wedding - Can I make the trip tax deductible?

thetownfool on 26/05/2014 - 23:22

HI all,

I'm travelling interstate for a wedding and will be there for 8 days. During that time there is a 2 day conference I'm thinking of attending. It's clearly work related and would actually be quite useful, it's just convenient it's on at the same time. Definitely not the express purpose of the trip, and I probably wouldn't travel that far to attend were it not for the wedding.

My question is by attending this conference is how much, if any, of my flights, accommodation and meals will be tax deductible? My wife and sons are travelling with me, obviously I can't claim their meals or travel, but does that mean I can only claim a proportion of my accommodation? And for the whole 8 days or just those related to the conference?

I'm pretty cautious about these claims as I work in an field where I usually claim a pretty huge number of work related expenses each year and figure that makes me a good candidate for being audited. And yes I could run it by my accountant at tax time, but would like to hear what the ozbargain community view is as well.

Financial

Comments

  • retiredfeline on 27/05/2014 - 00:04

    In the past on conference trips with a small leisure component, my accountant only claimed those parts related to work, i.e. the conference fee itself, the travel to the conference, accommodation for the conference nights, and a daily allowance for meals. That made sense to me. But I don't know what happens if it gets complicated. I mean can you justify a trip to Rio to attend a work conference if it happens to be around the footy games? You need to ask someone who has more than my 2c opinion.

  • ukmark on 27/05/2014 - 00:14
    +1

    I am not an accountant, but you have asked for people's views.

    It is my understanding (and I own a business) that you can claim the proportion of the trip that is for business.

    E.g. If out of 8 days, 2 days you are doing business related things you can claim 1/4 of your expenses for your share. 1/4 your share of hotel room, 1/4 of your travel, meals for yourself on those 2 days, etc.

    Also, if you can show you have tried to be fair with things like this, then you get audited and the ATO work out the expenses differently, they usually just want the difference - and give no fine for an honest mistake.

    My business got audited about 10 years ago, and it was not fun. 3 ATO employees at my office for nearly a week, and they found nothing. Talk about a waste of tax payers money, and mine for that matter. Turns out we were flagged because we made good profits, and directly imported goods. The were looking for evidence of importing inexpensive declared cases stuffed with undeclared expensive equipment inside. We didn't do this, so obviously there was nothing to find.

  • mskeggs on 27/05/2014 - 07:49
    -1

    You can claim the portion attributable to work.
    I would suggest you are travelling for two reasons, one of which is work related.

    With that in mind, I suggest 50% of your fares and 100% of the accommodation on the conference nights and 100% of the conf fees.

    You can also justify your meals on the conf days too, but whether you want to be claiming portions of a bill where you are dining with your family is up to you. I probably wouldn't, and would not mention anything about my family travelling too if I was audited.

    If you look at it from the ATO position, they can see you attended a conference, and you claimed accommodation on the relevant nights - so far no issue at all. If you had flown in and out on those days you would have been justified in claiming 100% of the flights too.

    But as you stayed on for some leisure time, you are only claiming 50% for flights. Sounds pretty fair to me!

  • cdeep0 on 27/05/2014 - 09:51

    Yes you can. If your accountant says - No.
    Time to change the accountant.

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