Let me start this out by saying I hate
preparing taxes; I get more wound up about doing them than just about anything
else. There’s something about the complexity of trying to figure out what
number goes on which line, and whether you’ve got the right number, the one that’s going to get you the lowest tax due,
that just sends me over the edge.
So, I pay someone to do my taxes for much the
same reason I pay someone to perform surgery, cut my hair or tune my car’s
engine: this is completely beyond my capabilities.
Last year, I was so paralyzed by the prospect
that I filed an extension for the 2016 returns and still barely made the 15
October deadline for getting them in. This year, being now a homeowner, I took
all my records in to the accountant who used to do my taxes right up until my third
year in California. This was in March—a tad late for the April filing deadline,
but not the latest I’ve ever been.
My guy looked at what I’d done for 2016. He
discovered that my employer had unaccountably withheld taxes for California
during that year (I left there in December 2015), so was due a refund for that.
Also, he reckoned that there was a big enough delta in the partial reimbursement
for my relocation expenses that it was worth filing an amended return to get a
refund. Woohoo!
Well, come around 14 April, the firm sent me the
completed extension form and told me I should send it in with a check for close
to three large. Shortly after that, I got an email and then a letter apologizing
that the new tax preparation software they’d got was proving much more challenging
than anticipated, and that the staff would get to all client returns in a
timely manner.
In past years, I know that Tommy and his team
have taken the latter part of April off—it’s like priests after Easter: they
need a break following the big push. So I didn’t expect immediate follow-up.
However, months passed, and long about mid-September I pinged them, leaving a
voicemail on Tommy’s line. A few days later I got a return VM from one of his
staff, saying that “they’re going to start working” on my taxes the following
week. This was very unsettling because I got the impression that my taxes hadn’t
been on anyone’s schedule, and wouldn’t have got on it if I hadn’t reminded
them of my existence.
I emailed in response to tell them not to FedEx
the returns to me because I was going to be out of town the entire next week
and did not want the package just sitting on my doorstep for that period of
time.
Silly me. Because on 4 October I got a call
from the assistant saying that someone named Hugo had started work on my taxes
and all was well.
Let me remind you that the deadline for filing
both federal and state taxes is 15 October. I was not charmed. But then it got
worse.
Because last Friday I got a call from this
Hugo, who was checking on a discrepancy in my driver’s license number. I can’t
recall why, but evidently Virginia requires you input your driver’s license
number (perhaps for the same reason they require you to show them your Social
Security actual card in order to get a driver’s license, which is why I haven’t
got one), and mine—being California—is one digit short. For Virginia.
I’m actually grateful for this anomaly, because
in the course of our conversation, and after he told me that there’s no change
in my 2016 taxes, it transpired that he was only vaguely aware that there was
something about my relocation expenses, and he wasn’t sure why there was withholding
tax for DC…
So I explained (as I had done back in March to Tommy)
that I’d lived in DC for two months in 2016, and the whole reason I was filing
an amended 2016 return was because of the
deduction for unreimbursed relocation expenses. Again, as discussed with
Tommy in March.
As a friend said that evening, “Was no one
taking notes?”
Soooo, okay. Late Monday, the assistant called
me to say that all my returns were ready, and did I want them to send them to
me, or did I want to pick them up. I did not fancy paying a marked-up FedEx
fee, so I said I’d go out to Leesburg on Wednesday. It’s occurred in the past
that I’ve caught errors in the preparation, so I thought it would be better if
I gave them a dekko while at their office, since we’re that close to the
deadline.
And thus it was that Tommy, the assistant and I
collectively discovered that the wrong state W-2s had been stapled to the
California and DC 2016 returns.
But then, as I was gathering everything up,
having signed all the forms (for electronic and snailmail submission), I told
Tommy that I hadn’t been overjoyed at owing so much un-withheld money for 2017—i.e.,
not enough money had been withheld during the year—and what strategy should I
employ for a more reasonable obligation. He said it depends on what “reasonable”
means to me—some people like getting a big refund, after all. I broke in that I’d
like it to be a little over-under zero, not having to write a check in four
figures.
So he fished around the return and looked at it.
(I think, being the owner and chief accountant of the firm, that he was
supposed to have checked Hugo’s work before, but…) And that was when he
discovered that nearly $5000 of property taxes hadn’t been entered on it (and,
clearly, not in the calculation made back in April that dictated what I sent to
the IRS with the extension). There followed about 15 minutes of searching
through all the papers I’d given him in March before we found the annual
statement from my 2017 mortgage holder. Turns out that Mr. Cooper (which
rebranded last year from Nationstar after multiple lawsuits and civil/criminal
penalties paid to various states, and which has embarked on an ad campaign
touting how kind they are to small animals) puts property taxes in an
unexpected place on that form, so Hugo hadn’t picked it up.
God give me strength.
As a tax professional, upon seeing an annual
mortgage statement, should it not occur to you to expect that there should be
property taxes involved somewhere in the year’s activity? And therefore should
you not look around until you, you know, found
them? Somewhere?
Tommy entered the taxes into my tax forms and
re-ran the calculation; I get more than $1000 back now from feds and Virginia.
Which is nice, but I can’t help wondering what’s been left out that we didn’t
catch in that hurried confab?
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