@linyphia1515 wrote:
Thanks. It is a weird situation for me, because I would never get these temp. employee gigs (university teaching) if I was not an active independent researcher, which entails expenses.
If you aren't making money as a researcher, you have nothing to deduct. You have to allocate your expenses based on the work you are actually doing. Suppose 50% of your income is earned as an independent contractor and 50% as a W-2 employee. Some expenses might be unique to one job or the other, while shared expenses would be allocated proportionally. You could deduct the unique expenses and the stared expenses allocated to the independent contractor work on your schedule C.
However, if you are an unpaid researcher, such that your reputation gets you other paying jobs, there is no ordinary way to deduct those research expenses since they are not tied to income.
And even if you were hired as a subcontractor to teach or do additional research, you could only deduct the expenses that were properly allocable to that particular activity for which you were hired, and not your general expenses that were not allocable to the work you were paid for.
