Baqir Hussain

The first one being premiums for income protection.

Yes, insurance.

And the reason for that is because any income that you earn is taxable.

And so if you're getting income protection insurance or premiums that you pay for income protection, that's claimable and deductible as an expense.

That's good because that's expensive.

Yes.

The other one is any interest that you pay to the IRD.

So sometimes for whatever reason, if you have tax debt payable to the IRD and if you've not paid it on time and there's interest applied to that debt, what IRD calls is use of money interest, that's also claimable as an expense.

Yes, and it's unfortunately quite high, the interest rate, and it's applied on a daily basis.

The third one is if you're engaging a tax agent to file or prepare your tax return.

So those are the three common ones under expenses.

You then have a lot of credits or rebates, which are technically not expenses, but the effect is that your taxable income is reduced or you get something back from the IRD.

The most common one there is donations.

A lot of people donate to their school, to registered charities, to their mosque, church, synagogue, temple, any entity that has a charitable status.

or registered with charity services, they get what is known as donee status.

And so what that means is firstly, there's no income tax that applies to the charities.

And if you or me as a taxpayer is paying from the after tax income that we get to the charity, what the IRD does is it allows you to claim back a third of the donated amount that you've given to that charity.

So that's a common one that's actually missed out.

And it's not even people missing out.

It's also not going back and claiming the last four years.