All the Food That's Fit to Deduct.

Editor's Note: One feature of the Internet -- at least for those more technologically more savvy than we are -- is the ability to send anonymous e-mail messages. One such message recently found its way to The Tax Executive. It is reprinted below.

My friend Seymour sent me an e-mail message the other day that ended up consuming more time than I thought it would. "Did you see," his message began, "that item in Sunday's New York Times on the Caucus Room?" He was talking about a short story in the September 3rd issue of "A Week in Review" concerning a new steak house in Washington whose investors list reads like a "Bipartisan Who's Who Among the Biggest and Best (and Beefiest) Lobbyists." Seymour's message continued:

The restaurant apparently consists primarily of private dining rooms. One sentence in the story reads: "Not so incidentally, lobbyists can deduct as much of their visits as possible -- 100 percent for a banquet, but only 50 percent for a regular meal." I know that there used to be a qualified meeting, or banquet, exception to section 274(n), but didn't that expire a long time ago? And I know that there's an argument that certain meals can qualify as a de minimis fringe. But a de minimis three-martini lunch? Is there a "private dinning room" exception that I've missed for these years? Hurry, because my boss is getting ready to hold all his meetings at the Caucus Room. And he's even hinted about filing amended returns for all the "banquets" he's attended in the past. My first response to Seymour was pretty simple. I told him to calm down. "Marian Burros does a good job writing about food for the Times," I replied, "but I don't think she even has a subscription to Tax Notes or RIA." Then I told him that his recollection of the tax law was correct. "The banquet exception," I wrote, "came in with the 50-percent disallowance in 1986 (it was only 20 percent initially), but from the outset it was set to expire at the end of 1988. Besides, meals at the Caucus Room couldn't possibly qualify under the old statutory rule. Section 274(n) provided that the program had to include the meal, the meal's cost could not be separately stated, the program had to have more than 40 participants, more than half of whom were traveling away from home, and there had to be a bona fide speaker."

My answer seemed to satisfy Seymour, who apparently told his boss that The New York Times was all wet. His boss, who never much cared for the Times's editorial...