form twenty-seven b stroke six
a while back, i think i mentioned that the irs suddenly decided that i owed them $3500 more on my 2005 tax return. i wrote them a polite letter citing a few key passages from their website that state plainly that they are mistaken (in short: i wasn’t my own boss, thus i was not, for their purposes, self-employed). a few months later, i get a big piece of certified mail from them. a big fat envelope, i figured, could hardly be good news. but it turned out to be basically two more copies of the same thing they sent me before, with no substantive commentary on my letter to them other than to say i can take it up with the u.s. tax court. presented with clear evidence that i do not in fact owe them more money, they fed it into their big black box of a bureaucracy, and succeeded only in regurgitating the same result. with two copies. it’s like talking to a robot. a fucking retarded robot built by microsoft. abort, retry, fail.
how do i, as an avowed liberal, reconcile this disdain for the irs with my supposed love of taxes? it boils down to being happy to pay for schools, roads, art, the space program, etc., but not wanting my time wasted, and sure as hell not wanting to worry about a big ‘gotcha’ lurking to swallow my checking account. the unpredictable nature of this whole thing means that i probably shouldn’t have booked a plane ticket next weekend (ok, not really, but it feels like it), and may have to put off replacing my car. because i can’t guarantee that when they look at all the information, they’ll agree with me. and it may not even be unjust; goodness knows there’s ample possibility of me being wrong. i’m an engineer, not a tax lawyer. this is why i paid h&r block for their dumb software. but if i made a reasonable effort to get it right and couldn’t, am i broken or are they?
it’s one more kick in the balls from the last two years, which amusingly enough, now don’t even have the decency to fucking end. but i’m not ready to fork over the money just yet.
