Deduct Sales tax on Sch A + Standard mileage on Sch C?

[AZ-Tax]

Client using vehicle (purchased in 2010) for business (10% bus use) and will take standard mileage on his Sch C business. Is he allowed to also deduct his sales tax paid on Sch A + take standard mileage?

[erchess]

I don't have a cite

but I think so. You're also going to deduct on Sch A the local tax on the value of the vehicle, right? At the very least given ten percent business use deduct 90% of these values on Sch A and consider 10% to be included in the mileage.

[FEDUKE404]

Likely all to Sch A

Interesting question -

For a person with Sch C auto expenses, I routinely take the business per cent (business miles/total miles) of any property taxes on Sch C, and then the remainder of those property taxes on Sch A. (Most tax software does that automatically, even for the standard mileage rate option.) OK, it frequently may save mere chump change on Sch SE but my heart is in the right place. And, of course, if no Sch A is possible then the client definitely comes out ahead.

My approach would be to consider the sales tax, paid at the time of purchase, to be essentially a part of the "cost" of the vehicle, and essentially included in the 50¢/mile rate allowed. A not too aggressive approach would be to have it ALL available for Sch A, but then you run into the very large 2010 brick wall that now (in most cases) makes use of auto sales tax only if you use the optional table sales tax amounts on line 5b of Sch A. Can you say "moot point"??

Again, this is a separate issue from the use of personal property taxes and/or auto loan interest amounts, which can be (partially) considered on Sch C.

FE

[taxxcpa]

Sales tax on business car

I believe I checked this years ago and found that tax on a business car was part of the purchase price which would be depreciated. I started to check it in the Tax Book, but there were 638 updates being downloaded and it may take an hour for the updates to download.

Another reason to get the web version next year.

After the downloads, I found that my above comment was correct. However the section I checked did not mention sales tax on cars for which the standard mileage was taken.

[FEDUKE404]

Question was about Schedule A?

I believe I checked this years ago and found that tax on a business car was part of the purchase price which would be depreciated. I started to check it in the Tax Book, but there were 638 updates being downloaded and it may take an hour for the updates to download.

Another reason to get the web version next year.

After the downloads, I found that my above comment was correct. However the section I checked did not mention sales tax on cars for which the standard mileage was taken.

I thought the OP was about whether there was any 2010 Sch A deduction for sales tax available on a personal vehicle used 10% for business purposes and also using the standard mileage rate. There was never an issue raised about the cost basis of said vehicle.

Sorry you had problems with the downloads, but one would think many other reliable sources, other than only TB, of that same information would be available. (See page 16 of http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p463.pdf as a quickly-found example.)

In any case, as explained earlier, for this specific (apparent) 2010 vehicle purchase the sales tax paid is virtually a non-issue. Things would have likely been different for a 2009 purchase and a vehicle that does not use the standard mileage rate. But someone else can have the pleasure of researching that issue....

FE