A funny thing happened to 3CM on the way to the April 15 income tax filing deadline. Namely, he figured out that for the first time in several years, he actually owed on his income taxes, both federal and state returns. Not particularly huge amounts combined, <$300 or so, so it was far from a big hit for self. It then occurred to me to try to glean why I suddenly owed taxes this year, which had, of course, a simple (and nice, in its way), answer. More below the flip.....
First, one needs to know that 3CM is more than a bit of a Luddite when it comes to filing taxes, in that he has never e-filed tax returns. The closest that I've ever gotten is downloading the forms and instructions off the respective IRS and MO DOR tax sites, but then filling them out on printed out copies with paper, pencil and calculator. Or, more accurately, I do my federal form first, because you have to complete the federal form before completing the state form. I presume that this is standard for state forms, as I had to do the same when I lived in PA also.
In addition, I always do my taxes manually, i.e. I've never bought TurboTax or any other program to calculate my taxes. Invariably, every year, I make some mistakes on the first go, but I put it away for a bit and then re-do them. Equally invariably, I fix the first errors I caught, but then more crop up, usually subtler ones that I missed the 1st time (e.g. transposing two digits in a number). It usually winds up being 3 or 4 cycles before I don't find new errors, or just get tired of it all.
But no matter what, it wound up that I owed taxes. It turns out that several of my mutual fund investments, which I'd socked away and kind of left to do their thing, actually did pretty well this year, in terms of dividends. They actually did quite a bit better than last year, so that bumped my overall income up rather more than I was expecting. Hence the higher overall tax bill, and 3CM owing the federal and state treasuries $. Your normal tea party hypocrite and bigot would rail on about paying more taxes, even if s/he already pays pretty low (or, if s/he has the resources, knows how to game the system to minimize or eliminate tax payments) tax rates. However, 3CM is far from that, so that I actually don't mind sending checks to the IRS and MO DOR. So, of course, in the eyes of teabagger bigots, 3CM would be a big-time loser for doing the right thing (morally, not political-orientationally) by paying his fair share of taxes.
Unfortunately, thanks to the anti-tax hysteria stoked by the right-wing for decades now, too many people have no qualms about trying to bilk the IRS:
"During the 2013 filing season, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, the IRS prevented $24.2 billion worth of identity-related fraud but still paid $5.2 billion in refunds on 900,000 phony returns. Those are just the cases where the agency or a taxpayer eventually discovered the fraud; the true losses may be larger."
David Nicklaus, in his
Post-Dispatch blog entry noted above, also cited the current IRS commissioner, regarding the IRS being hamstrung for resources:
"The tax collectors, for their part, say they can’t stop the problem without help from Congress. “Criminals are hard at work reverse engineering our fraud filters, and we need new tools and technology,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a House subcommittee last year."
Given the current make-up of Congress, no prizes for guessing how much they want to help the IRS (i.e. none). Not that the IRS doesn't make mistakes or do stupid things at times, to be sure. But for wingnuts who accuse the IRS of "bias", if you were continually harassing my line of work and threatening to wipe my workers out of existence, I'd want to pay special attention to your public bloviations.
Nicklaus mentions identity theft as a big part of the problem, which another P-D article by Jim Gallagher here notes:
"St. Louis has the dubious distinction of having the third-highest rate of identity theft among major metropolitan areas in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission says in a recent report......
The FTC reported 5,724 complaints of ID theft in 2014 in St. Louis. That is a rate of 204 per 100,000 population."
Not that I'm personally immune to identity theft, but learning this is yet one more reason for 3CM not to file tax returns electronically. Especially because 3CM is a terminally single loser, I have relatively simplified taxes to file, i.e. no information related to dual income, kids, or a divorce or other complications. Of course, in order to do the calculations manually, I have to start relatively early, which I did, but only well into the year, around February, after weeks of dithering and waiting for forms, or to access investment info on-line. Needless to say, the actual first round of calculations only took one evening. Subsequent re-calculations take the better part of single evenings, but at least I can do them in single evenings, if I know to block out other stuff. At least the one non-loserly part is that 3CM is done for this year. Plus, looking ahead to next year, at least that's one line that won't be an issue, namely reporting refunds from 2014 on my 2015 returns. So it goes.
With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week....