Again, thank you for your help and your time.
It's tricky but I may be able to claim home office deduction and/or unreimbursed employee expenses. In my case, I already had reached out to the employer and let them know it's an advantage to them if they reimburse me and, that way, they can deduct on their employer taxes but, basically, there's very limited employee reimbursement, and I'm reading everywhere that that's the best bet for W2 employees working from home due to covid. I have an actual office I use exclusively for work in the home. If I can itemize on the state return, it could be interesting. NY is following the 2017 IRS Tax law for employee expenses and, last I checked, telecommuting due to covid is not in the 2017 IRS Tax law but it is in the 2020 IRS Tax law. And we know that telecommuting due to covid is not a valid excuse on the federal level.
Going by all that logic, it stands to reason that I have some ground to declare I have a home office and unreimbursed employee expenses the state should be able to deduct, assuming itemize is greater than standard deduction. As long as I have proper explanations, paperwork, receipts. documentation, I don't see how it's invalid to declare it.
Going back to the electric bill, since that's considered a type of utility, I gather it'd be very unusual, if not a red flag, to declare it as an unreimbursed employee expense, as opposed to part of the home office deduction.
One final thing: As I said, I wanted to see the government and TurboTax worksheets for IT-196 (the itemize deduction form for New York State); however, with my current numbers, the NYS standard deduction is still higher than the itemized number. I might be able to see the worksheets with the CD/desktop computer version of the software. With regards to the web version, however, TurboTax won't include these forms in the return preview unless the deduction is itemized.
I didn't want to go through the trouble of manually calculating the numbers for IT-196 to check the difference between the itemized and standard deduction numbers. I figured out another way without having to do all those calculations: I purposely entered in very high numbers for the home office deduction such that my New York State number for how much I owe/how much my refund is changed. I previewed my tax returns, including all government and TurboTax worksheets and, sure enough, there was IT-196 with all the calculations filled in. I was able to walk backwards and figure out just how much I'd need over the 2% AGI for the system to use the itemize deduction over the standard deduction. Now I can undo the changes and re-evaluate if I have enough expenses/home office deductions. I'd have preferred TurboTax just allow me to see the worksheets without having to play with the numbers but this was helpful and I didn't have to manually calculate IT-196 which saved me a lot of time.
