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DEDUCTION FOR JOURNALISTS

Can you think of a world without information? Journalists are working day and night to keep us up to date. Thus, the tax office recognises their services and offers them a handful number of deductions. So, if you are working as a journalist, then you can claim work related expenses as deductions to reduce your taxable income. You can claim all or some part of expenses as deductions that are incurred for your work purpose. Some of the work-related expenses that you can claim as deductions are listed below:

•  Travel Expenses and Meals: You can claim the cost of travel to investigate or report an incident, meeting with an interviewee, attend seminars or training courses. You can also claim deductions for your meals when you need to stay away overnight for work related purpose and your work counts as overtime.
•  Capital allowances: You can claim the cost for depreciating your purchased capital that you use for work but you cannot claim the cost if the capital is provided by your organisation.
•  Self-Education Expenses: If you are paying course fees, newspapers, magazines, books, stationery cost related to your work purpose then you can claim them as deductions.
• Hiring Equipment: You cannot claim the cost of equipment for personal uses but if you hire the equipment for work purpose then you can claim as deduction.
• Repairs and Maintenances: You can claim the costs for any repairs to the equipment or tools like maintenance charge of computers. 
• Union and Membership: If you have a cost for union or professional association fees, you can claim them as deduction.
• Bank/Account fees: You can claim the cost of interest charged on money you borrowed from bank or insuring your tools and equipment for your work-related purpose.
• Social functions: If you attend to report a social function then you can claim a deduction for your cost.
• Sunglasses, sunhats and sunscreens: If your work requires you to work outdoors a lot then then you can claim a deduction for protective items such as sunglasses. 
• Pay Internet & other access payment: You can claim a deduction for internet connection fees. You can also claim the cost of work-related telephone calls, work-related portion of pay TV access payments if you can show that you are required to access pay TV as part of your work.