1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*182
The petitioner found no suitable employment in the vicinity of his family residence, so he accepted positions in other localities, but did not change his residence. He had no business ties to the area of his residence. No travel was required in the course of his work.
55 T.C. 783">*783 The respondent determined a deficiency of $ 364.45 in the income tax of the petitioners for 1967. The issue for decision is whether one of the petitioners was away from home for tax purposes during parts of the taxable year in issue.
FINDINGS OF FACT
Some of the facts have been stipulated, and those facts are so found.
The petitioners, Truman C. Tucker and Birdie Jo Tucker, filed a joint Federal income tax return for 1967 with the district director of internal revenue, Nashville, Tenn. They maintained their residence in Knoxville, Tenn., when the petition was filed in this case. Mr. Tucker will be referred to as the petitioner.
The petitioner and his family moved to a small farm in the vicinity of Knoxville, Tenn., in late 1965. He worked as an insurance salesman in the Knoxville area until March 1966. At that time, he enrolled as a student in Tennessee Wesleyan College in Athens, Tenn., where he had studied previously. 1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*184 The college was located about 65 miles from the farm, and while he was a student, he lived in a house that he owned near the college, although his wife and child remained at the farm near Knoxville.
The petitioner graduated in the summer of 1966, with a major in business administration and a minor in education. He desired to be a teacher, and during the summer of 1966, he inquired in and around the Knoxville area as to the availability of teaching positions, but could find none. Through a notice at Tennessee Wesleyan College, he learned of an available teaching position in Trenton, Ga., with the school 55 T.C. 783">*784 system of Dade County, beginning in August 1966. The position required 9 months and 2 weeks of teaching. Because the petitioner believed that he could not find work in the Knoxville area for that school year, he applied for and obtained the position. He went to Dade County with the intent to hold that position no longer than 1 school year. From August 1966 until June 1967, the petitioner taught in the school system of Dade County, and lived in the area of Trenton. His wife and child remained during that entire time at their farm near Knoxville, Tenn. The child attended1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*185 school in the Knoxville area, and Mrs. Tucker was employed at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where she had worked continuously since 1965.
In April 1967, the Dade County Board of Education voted to rehire the petitioner for the following school year, and arranged for a renewal of his Georgia temporary teaching certificates. However, the petitioner then informed the school personnel that he would not accept the position for another year because he wanted to return to the Knoxville area.
The petitioner spent the summer of 1967 at his farm. He did not hold a job during that summer, but did some work around his farm, including digging a pond. He made substantial efforts to find a position as a teacher in Knoxville, in Knox County, and in surrounding cities and counties located in proximity to his farm; but those efforts were unsuccessful.
In August 1967, when the petitioner traveled to North Carolina to pay taxes on another farm that he owned there, he learned that there was an available teaching position in Murphy, N.C. As it was getting late in the summer and he needed a position, and apparently he could not obtain one in the Knoxville vicinity, he accepted the position1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*186 in Murphy. This position called for 9 months and 1 week of teaching. Again, the petitioner went to the area of his employment to live, while his wife and child remained on the Tennessee farm. His wife continued to work in Knoxville.
Soon after the school year was under way, the petitioner realized that the arrangement whereby his family remained in Tennessee while he worked and lived in a distant city was unsatisfactory. The duplicate living expenses proved onerous. Therefore, he asked his employers at Murphy to release him from his contract and allow him to leave midway during the school year. He planned to leave at the Christmas vacation, but the superintendent persuaded him to stay until the school could find a replacement. A replacement was found in February 1968, and the petitioner returned to his farm near Knoxville. He has remained in the Knoxville area since then. He was unemployed except for some odd jobs from February 1968 until September 1969, when he found employment as a teacher in the Knoxville school system.
55 T.C. 783">*785 The petitioner believed that his difficulty in finding a teaching position in the Knoxville vicinity was attributable to the fact that many graduates1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*187 of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville decided to stay in that area to teach, resulting in a surplus of teachers.
It is undisputed that the petitioner incurred total living expenses of $ 1,330 while in Georgia and North Carolina during 1967.
The petitioner's farm near Knoxville, Tenn., was not a money-making venture in 1966, 1967, or 1968. No produce or cattle were sold from the farm in those years. The 1967 tax return reports that the sole income on that farm and two others owned by the petitioners was $ 1,219.61 in agricultural program payments, and that the operations of those farms produced a loss of $ 260.41. The petitioners ceased residing on the farm in August 1968 when they moved to a house in Knoxville.
OPINION
We must decide whether the petitioner is entitled to deduct the living expenses which he incurred in 1967 in Dade County, Ga., and Murphy, N.C., while working as a schoolteacher in those areas.
Personal living expenses are ordinarily nondeductible.
In
Since the
The purpose of allowing the deduction of living expenses while a taxpayer is "away from home" is "to mitigate the burden of the taxpayer who, because of the exigencies of his trade or business, must maintain1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*190 two places of abode and thereby incur additional and duplicate living expenses."
On the other hand, if a taxpayer chooses for personal reasons to maintain a family residence far from his principal place of employment, then his additional traveling and living expenses are incurred as a result of that personal choice, and are therefore not deductible.
When the appropriate criteria are applied to the circumstances of this case, we find that the petitioner was not away from home in the pursuit of his trade or business within the meaning of
55 T.C. 783">*787 During the entire time with which we are concerned, the petitioner had no business connection1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*192 with the Knoxville area. Although he had worked there briefly as an insurance salesman, he gave up that occupation in early 1966 when he returned to college.
Furthermore, at the time the petitioner sought the teaching jobs, he had no indication of when, if ever, he could obtain the type of position he wanted in the Knoxville area, in light of (1) the apparent plentiful supply of teachers there, and (2) the total lack of available teaching positions anywhere in the area as revealed by the petitioner's diligent search. By any reasonable standard, the prospects of employment in that area must have seemed bleak, or at best, unpromising; yet, the petitioner chose to keep his family residence there for reasons of personal choice that were
The petitioner argues that he should receive the benefit of the exception carved out of the tax-home rule to accommodate taxpayers with temporary jobs. However, this exception was intended to operate when the taxpayer's trade or business required him to travel, and when the duration of each job was such as to make it unreasonable to expect him to move his family. It seems1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*193 manifestly clear, however, that the trade or business of being a schoolteacher, working for one school district and presumably in one school, is not the sort of occupation which requires the taxpayer to travel about or to maintain additional living quarters away from his established residence. Furthermore, while a job duration of 6 or 9 months might be short enough under some circumstances to merit a finding that it would be unreasonable to expect the taxpayer to move his family, we cannot reach such a conclusion here, when the taxpayer had no business ties to the area of his previously established residence, and when the prospects for employment in his chosen profession were better away from that area than in it. Indeed, when a new college graduate finds that the area where he lives offers no employment opportunities in his field, and the prospects for future employment there are poor, it seems more reasonable for him to move his family to a locale offering more opportunities, than to insist steadfastly on keeping his family in the same place while he himself goes elsewhere to work. When a taxpayer chooses the latter course, it is clearly motivated by personal reasons unrelated1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*194 to his trade or business, and as such, his additional living expenses are nondeductible under
This case is distinguishable from the situations in which a taxpayer's trade or business requires him to take jobs of necessarily brief duration in disparate localities away from the area of his personal residence, and in which a taxpayer is sent temporarily to a distant locale 55 T.C. 783">*788 at the request and direction of his employer, and in which a taxpayer retains business ties in the place from whence he has come. See
We point out that the petitioner's testimony made it amply clear that his farm was not a trade or business being conducted for profit, so that we are not faced with the situation of a taxpayer having two businesses simultaneously1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*195 in different areas. Nor does the fact of the petitioner's wife's continued employment in Knoxville support the argument that Knoxville was the petitioner's "home" for tax purposes.
Because of the petitioner's concessions on other issues,
Drennen,
In the past this Court has frequently considered this issue to be a factual issue with the conclusion depending on the particular circumstances involved. In doing so, I think we have gradually1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*196 extended the principles of law on which the deduction of such expenses might be allowable and have undermined the provisions of the law which disallow the deduction of personal living expenses. I am glad that Judge Simpson recognized this in this case and has taken a hard look at where those decisions were leading.
If this was an issue of first impression, I would have difficulty in recognizing that expenditures for food and lodging while teaching school for 9 1/2 months in one location could be said to be expenses incurred "while traveling." However, I realize that the Courts have long accepted being temporarily away from home in the pursuit of a trade or business as being in a travel status for this purpose even though the taxpayer is not constantly on the move.
The second condition stated by the Supreme Court in the
In addition, the "temporary" versus "indefinite" employment question usually arises only where work at a new place of employment would cause a
The third condition expressed in
Thus we are left with the question whether these expenses were incurred in pursuit of, had a direct connection with the carrying on of, and were necessary or appropriate to the development and pursuit of, a trade or business of the taxpayer individually. Certainly it cannot be said that petitioner's expenditures for food and lodging were necessary or directly connected, or were beneficial, to the jobs petitioner was employed to perform. Petitioner or someone else could have performed the jobs whether they were living away from home or not. In my opinion, the only way in which these expenditures could even remotely be considered incurred in and necessary to a trade or business of the petitioner is by recognizing that petitioner's business was that of being an employee, which is a1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*201 concept relied on more and more by this Court in recent years to permit the deduction of personal living expenses.
When the Supreme Court said in
If we were to allow the deduction sought here, I would view it as an open invitation to any schoolteacher, retired legal stenographer (see
In view of the uncertainty and confusion caused by the seemingly inconsistent positions sometimes taken by the lower courts in cases involving this issue, I suggest that either the Supreme Court (which has approached it but backed off on several occasions, see
I agree that the deductions for petitioner's living expenses while teaching school in Georgia and North Carolina should be denied.
Hoyt,
We have recently confirmed that employed persons can be in the trade or business of being employees so that expenses incurred in obtaining employment are reasonable and necessary business expenses 55 T.C. 783">*792
Here the taxpayer is a schoolteacher. He was in the trade or business of being a member of the teaching profession and began his professional career in the year prior to the year before us. See
1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*205
In the many intervening years since
Generally, a taxpayer is entitled to deduct unreimbursed travel1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*206 expenses only when they are required by "
[Emphasis added.]
This exception dictates, in a long line of cases, that if a taxpayer's "stay at the new post of business is to be temporary -- 'the sort of employment in which termination within a short period could be foreseen' (
We have held in many cases that a salaried employee or wage earner, who
As recognized by the majority opinion, the away-from-home provision is designed to mitigate the burden of the taxpayer, who because of the exigencies of
It has been recognized that the employment away from home must be temporary "in contemplation at the time of its acceptance and not indeterminate in fact as it develops."
In
In
We concluded that he was entitled to deduct the expenses he incurred for living abroad during the entire time he was away as "traveling expenses" under
As recently as March 30, 1970, we allowed a deduction for away from home living expenses to a taxpayer who had not worked in the area of his residence for a number of years, but was employed in the year before us in the Washington, D.C., area on a job lasting for 6 months. For several years he obtained his jobs through his local union office in Washington, D.C., and maintained no business ties with his hometown in Maryland, 80 miles from Washington. We held the taxpayer's residence in Maryland remained his tax home where he did not have a nontemporary principal place of business away from the vicinity of the residence.
Our opinion in
For example, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, 1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*212 it is normally to be presumed from common experience that a man with a wife and children would prefer to work regularly in or near the locality where his family resides so that he may be with them during off-duty hours. That a worker has a family with a fixed residence should therefore tend to show that he takes jobs at distant points for business rather than for personal reasons. Should his case present the additional fact that there is a shortage of work in the locality where the family resides, or a shortage of sufficient work there to provide year-round employment, there would be even stronger reasons to conclude that the jobs are taken elsewhere for business rather than for personal reasons. * * *
As the majority opinion recognizes, the evidence here is convincing that petitioner preferred to work in the Knoxville area and that he sought diligently to obtain a teaching position in that area; being unable to find one there, he left his home and family in August 1966 to accept the Georgia teaching job for 9 months, fully intending to return to Knoxville and his family the following June, which he did. The following fall after his efforts to obtain a teaching job near Knoxville1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*213 once more proved futile, he again made the same hard choice, dictated by the same business motives and necessity. As in the case of the prior job, he intended to stay in North Carolina for only 1 school year, 9 months. As the situation developed, however, he was unable to stick it out even that long, because of the "onerous" burden of duplicated living expenses. He returned to his home in Knoxville after only 5 months. He never intended to remain indefinitely, for an indeterminate period, or permanently in either Dade County or in Murphy, N.C. He maintained his home and family in Knoxville, where his wife continued her own gainful employment, at his fixed and established residence. Later on he obtained a teaching job in Knoxville which was what he attempted to do from the start.
In the year before us petitioner spent 3 months at home in Knoxville, and worked for 5 months in Georgia and for 4 months in North Carolina. I think the conclusion inescapable that under the rationale of many previously decided cases the petitioner's two brief employments in question were temporary and that his tax home was in Knoxville; it would be unreasonable to expect him to move his home and family1971 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 182">*214 to Georgia in 1966 or North Carolina in 1967; in my view his expenses away from home were occasioned by business reasons and directly related to the carrying on of his teaching profession and not by personal choice. See quoted portion of
The majority opinion does real violence to the doctrine of stare decisis and will create doubt, confusion, and uncertainty as to the position of the Tax Court on this issue, thus inviting increased litigation. I fail to see the necessity for such
1. All statutory references are to the Internal Revenue Code of 1954.↩
1. The Court of Appeals in