that does make a lot of sense.

I just finished working on my 2008 officiating earnings and expenses. In 2008, the mileage rate before July 1 is $0.505 / mile. July 1 and beyond it is $0.585 / mile.

As you can see with the mileage of some of these folks, that works out to a pretty sizeable deduction.

In my case, I was in the black for the first time in 6 years. The schools in VT re-imburse 40.5 cents per mile, but I did not want to open Pandora's Box by trying to get the remainder, so I only used miles to meetings or game sites where there was no re-imbursement such as AAU or a handful of JV games that I did.

Thanks for that info...now I can separate the miles on my spreadsheet and save me time when entering that onto my tax prep software.

My deduction was a tad over $2,600 on nearly 5000 miles.

About 8300 miles for 240 games (baseball and basketball combined; all HS or college; fewer than 30 "summer league" games)

Do you get to deduct round trip miles or just one way miles.

Round trip.

That depends. Do you go back home after the game, or just stay at the game site until it's time to leave for the next game?

HAHA! This is the post of the month!

Why? You should be counting the mileage reimbursement as income and then taking the full deduction for the miles driven regarless of how much either is. Even if they cancel out to $0.00, they should be documented to avoid the audit bug.

And sometimes, the mileage reimbursement doesn't even come close to what you can deduct, so the difference would be a deduction. For example, our football crew each chips in $5 or $10 (depending on distance) to the driver. That's $20 or $40 each time. He figures up the mileage and claims whatever wasn't reimbursed by the crew as mileage for him to deduct. We don't get mileage to any of our games around here, sigh. Maybe someday.

Good idea. I will do that next year. And if I have to amend, it will be to our advantage.

I keep waiting for the next "version" of this thread. :)