Meg Saksida explains when a journey can be deductible from income tax and when it cannot.
The issue
When a sole trader or a partner wishes to claim business expenses, they need to make sure they are “wholly and exclusively” incurred for the purpose of the business. Travel expenses are particularly problematic as quite often we will have a joint purpose for the journey, known in tax language as a ‘duality of purpose’. Alternatively, having started from home, the journey could be inferred to be normal commuting which is usually not allowable for tax purposes.
Normal commuting
In order to be a qualifying journey, the whole journey or an identifiable part of it must be wholly and exclusively for the business. The process of getting to one’s place of work is not deemed to be made in the course of the
