Don’t put the brakes on breaks that can significantly lessen the amount siphoned off for taxes. Yet to be on the safe side, ask yourself this question: Do you know which deductions might boost your return’s chances of triggering the IRS computers to put you on the audit list? If so, fortify your Form 1040 with sufficient backup information and documentation. Here are two of the items that increase the likelihood of your return drawing the attention of the feds, along with reminders of what you can do to avoid springing these audit snares, or to free yourself if you do get tapped for an audit.

According to latest available IRS statistics, if your income is above $50,000, whether filing as a single person or jointly with your spouse, you are four times more likely to be audited than someone whose income is between $10,000 and $25,000 and who takes the standard deduction, the no-proof-required amount that is automatically available without having to itemize. The odds for an audit also go up if you’re self-employed (an "independent contractor"); the IRS assumes the self-employed are more likely than salaried workers to understate their income and overstate their expenses.

The other red flag for an audit is the home office deduction. The initial barrier is a two-step test that establishes how you use your home office. You must use a portion of your home regularly and exclusively for your business. What constitutes regular use? Just how the IRS construes use, depends on the particular circumstances. There are no requirement that the endeavor be full-time. It can be part-time, as when you have a full-time job as a salesperson at a camera store, and moonlight from your home office as a stock photographer.

Principal Place of Business. You are not home free just because you pass the exclusive and regular tests. Next, you must consider what you do in your home office. In IRS-speak, it has to be the principal place of your business. Beginning with returns for 1999, to be filed in 2000, a "principal place of business" includes a home office used for your business’ key administrative or management activities, provided there is no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative or management functions for that business.

Thus, assuming the other requirements are met, the deduction remains available to someone who also (1) carries out administrative or management activities while traveling (for example, from a hotel room or an auto) or (2) does occasional paperwork or other administrative tasks at a fixed location of the business outside the home.

Overwhelmed by the complexities of home-office deductions? Perhaps you can draw a measure of relief from these often-cited quotations:

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing." Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), finance minister to King Louis XIV of France.

"If geese are to be plucked with the least squawking, which is the aim of all taxation, the fatter ones will always tempt politicians more because they have more feathers and there are fewer of them to screech." The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 1982.