Trickiest Thing About Deduction Is Claiming It

Congress has enacted a new tax deduction with no place on the tax return to claim it.

The change affects workers who continue to receive regular paychecks while serving as jurors and turn their jury pay over to their employers.

The jury pay still must be reported as taxable income. But before the 1986 tax overhaul, a person who itemized deductions could simply deduct the surrendered jury pay as a miscellaneous expense and be none the worse. But the 1986 law permits only miscellaneous deductions that exceed 2% of adjusted gross income.

That meant most jurors who were required by employers to surrender jury pay in return for having their regular paychecks continue would have to pay tax on income they didn’t keep.

Congress discovered the inequity earlier this year and corrected it as part of a big miscellaneous tax bill.

But by the time President Reagan signed the bill into law on Nov. 11, the new tax forms already were being printed--without any way to account for the jury pay problem.

“Our tax forms people are looking at it, but we still aren’t sure how it will be handled,” IRS spokesman Paul Nirdlinger said Wednesday, adding that experts feel that the provision affects very few taxpayers.

The best bet, he said, is that affected taxpayers will be allowed to write in the surrendered jury pay on Form 1040 line 30.