Saturday, March 16, 2013

#*~`^\< Income Tax

   I'm a stubborn old coot and I insist on always doing my income tax on my own.

    My income tax is not complicated so it's doable. There are a couple of curves . I can split some things to gain some advantages. This is where the bus went in the ditch. If you split things you have to file a special form with all the details of the split. I have never found a more convoluted form than this one. There are five steps and they are weird.

   Now the routine around our place is that I fill out the tax forms and my manager checks them. Now I'm not perfect so I make the odd mistake. So when my manager got to the form to split things she thought it was wrong and began to change things. She got really frustrated and called me. Since I was looking at a form she was filling out I was  confused for a while. Then for the next 4 steps we stumbled and yes words flew and got louder. After two hours of reading and rereading, we found that my first attempt was the right one. Worse than that we then discovered that there was no need to split that part of income. Luckily it didn't matter if we did split or not split. That meant that we didn't have to do the whole process over again.

    So we sat down and wrote a letter to ourselves that next year it wouldn't be necessary to do the splitting. So next year we will find the letter in the file and it will tell us what to do.

   So once again the income tax is done without too much damage to the premises, bodies or minds.