Professors lucky enough to get laptops from their institutions may want to watch out — the taxman could come knocking.
Manchester College has announced that employees with university-owned laptops will now have to add those laptops to their tax forms as taxable items. This means a $1,600 laptop with a four-year life expectancy would add $400 per year to an employee’s taxable income, Manchester’s information-technology director, Michael Case, wrote in a message sent to an e-mail list for campus technology officials hosted by Educause.
At Manchester, the news has caused “significant push back from employees” who want to avoid paying additional taxes, Mr. Case wrote.
“Many want to exchange their laptop for a desktop to avoid the tax liability in the future,” he wrote. “I can’t blame them because I’m thinking the same thing.”
Because university laptops are often used for personal purposes, the Internal Revenue Service counts them as taxable “fringe benefits,” said Bertrand Harding, a tax lawyer specializing in nonprofit institutions, in an interview with The Chronicle. If a college is able to provide documentation showing such laptops were used for business purposes every time they were turned on, it would not have to pay tax on the machines. But few institutions could offer any such proof, Mr. Harding said.
In recent years, the IRS has started to crack down on fringe benefits like laptops and cellphones, and it has asked institutions to pay taxes that were not withheld from employees, Mr. Harding said.
This has resulted in an increasing number of colleges — like Manchester — listing laptops as taxable items, Mr. Harding said.
“Some colleges just put their heads in the sand and say we’re just going to wait for the IRS to come,” Mr. Harding said. “Others are changing their policies so they don’t get hammered when the IRS comes in.” —David Shieh
