I recently received an email about deductions that can be taken by volunteers.  It had a lot of good information about deducting your mileage, out of pocket expenses related to your volunteer work, and your travel costs.  But the one problem I had with the information is that, according to the IRS, you can only take a deduction for your volunteer travel if there is no significant element of personal pleasure involved.  Well, as a former Scout Leader, I have a problem with that definition. 

The way it's written, it sounds like you can only deduct your volunteer expenses if you hated your volunteer job.  That's just not true.  Volunteering is fun.  And it's okay to enjoy volunteering and write off your expenses.  Let's say you take your Girl Scout troop up to Camp Fiddlecreek for the weekend.  You pay for gas, you stop for dinner along the way, and you pay your own way for the camping trip.  (And you have a great time!)  Those are all perfectly legitimate expenses to write off.  If there are no leaders or parent volunteers, there's no Girl Scouts.  Volunteers are important for the community.

So what would be an example of too much significant pleasure?  Let's say that same troop needs extra drivers to get the girls to the camping event so you volunteer to drive the Girl Scouts up to Camp and drop them off with their leader.  On the way home you stop at Lumiere Place, drop a few hundred dollars at the casino, spend $250 on dinner at Cielo, and spend the night at the Four Seasons hotel before going home the next morning.   In this situation, I'd say that you could deduct mileage involved in driving the girls to camp, but that's it.   You do see the difference between these two examples, though, don't you?   You can have fun volunteering, but if you're writing off expenses, they have to be directly related to the charity.  Remember, you can only write off actual expenses, you can't write off the value of the time you spend volunteering.