Business Tax and Writers
* Re “Alatorre Proposes Exempting Home-Based Writers From Tax,” Nov. 19: Applause for Councilman Richard Alatorre, who has offered a proposal that would clarify what kinds of home-based business activities can be taxed under the city’s controversial home occupancy and business tax ordinances.
PEN Center USA West is one of a number of writers’, artists’ and entertainment organizations that strongly support this proposal, not because it would extend preferential treatment to writers but because it more accurately defines what is and what is not a home business.
Although many of us work at home and enjoy an enviable freedom in deciding what we write, in commercial terms we are the work force of the writing business, not individual business owners. Our checks come from corporations, not from clients or direct consumers of our products. Our employers in turn repackage and market our work to the public for their profit.
For creative and freelance writers working at home, as for other work-at-home artists and freelance and outsourced employees from a number of industries, the city’s business tax plan in its present form mistakenly reclassifies what are in fact wages as taxable business earnings.
LARRY SIEMS, Director
Freedom to Write Program
PEN Center USA West
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