Dear Internal Revenue Service:

The BBQ Pit
1

Dear Internal Revenue Service:

I wish to give you money. You, presumably, wish to take my money. Taking my money is your primary reason for existence.

Despite the fact that I work for the federal government, you do not withhold money out of my paychecks directly, and, for reasons too convoluted to go into, I must pay “Estimated taxes” every three months.

Conveniently, you have set up a website for taking my money automatically! It’s called the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS)! I just fill in my SSN, bank routing number, bank account number, amount of last year’s refund, length of armpit hair in millimeters, and the number you’re thinking of right now. Fortunately, I guessed correctly that you were thinking of the square root of negative three, and I have been authorized to give you money.

Oh, wait. I need a password to give you money. Obviously, I can’t just pick a password to use for your website – that would be insecure. So, you must send me a SECURE password.

By snail mail.

What ho? Here, a mere three weeks later, is a letter which contains my password! Oh, wait. That’s not my password. It’s my PIN. Which is, of course, different from my password. To get my password, I must call an automated help line (which is of course more secure than using the damn website) with my SSN, PIN, “trace number”, and the square root of negative seven.

But now I have a password! I can log in any time I want! Oh, wait. I have to change the password immediately to a user-generated password. Which, of course, I could have picked three weeks ago.

But now I’m in the system, and I can schedule my payments for estimated taxes. Oh, wait. 1040ES (for estimated taxes) is not among the forms supported, and the system won’t allow me to type it in.

But you have a live help line! After a minimal wait (really!), you inform me that I’m supposed to select the form 1040, after which the system will give me the option of different form 1040 options, including the 1040ES. Duh.

So now I’m in, and I can conveniently schedule automatic payments for the rest of the year! Oh, wait. I’m getting an error message that I’ve scheduled duplicate payments. I don’t want to do that – I give you enough money already – but I’m sure this is the first time I’ve entered payments into your system, so I don’t know why you’re registering duplicates.

Live help line again! This time, you inform me that multiple payments for the same tax year are marked as duplicates, even though everyone who pays estimated taxes has to pay four times per year. I’m supposed to just hit “override”. Duh.

So now, three weeks, one letter, three phone calls, and a good four hours spent online later, I have set up automatic payments for my federal estimated taxes. Mind you , this is a process which took me maybe 20 minutes for my state estimated taxes.

IRS, you can take your EFTPS and shove it where your auditors get their ideas. You have the sorriest attempt at a mange-ridden, retarded, tertiary-syphilis victim of an online payment system ever witnessed by a jaded websurfer. The pathetic losers at Paypal snigger every time they think of you; Western Union has little shivers of schadenfreude at the sound of our acronym. You suck.

Best regards and go suck an egg,

mischievous

2

But… What’s wrong with it?

3

I pay my business’s federal taxes (EFTPS), two states taxes and city taxes online and have been doing so for about two years. I am here to tell you that I have made the educated assumption that ALL online government tax paying services suck. They are all extremely cumbersome and feel really outdated even if they’re new.

If you can believe it, EFTPS got…better…in 2007. They updated their site. Yep - it used to be worse!

Once you break through all of the weird ass security stuff and then figure out how to navigate to the exact payments you need to make, you’re ok as long as you remember the steps. Ohio keeps changing their interface to make it more confusing. Georgia, so far, is confusing me because I got switched to monthly payments the month after I made my first successful quarterly payment.

You gotta admit, tho…this is waaay better than going to the bank to make a payment, don’t you think? (or do individuals not have to do that? Businesses do…sucks!)

4

If you are a federal employee and not a contractor, talk to your agency’s HR so that the proper withholding is taken out.

5

Sigh. I work full-time for the NIH, but technically I’m a scientific “Fellow”, not an “Employee”, so my money is a “Stipend” rather than a “Salary”, which means it’s taxable income but they can’t legally withhold taxes. Them’s the breaks.

6

I sincerely hope that all of my payments go through as scheduled and I’m done with them for the year. I also sincerely hope that my brain has purged the necessary information by the time I have to deal with this next year.

7

Heh. You got off easy. You weren’t outright lied to.

What do the IRS and a pelican have in common?

They can both stick their bill up their ass.

8

You do realize you’re going to have to come in this weekend to work on those TPS reports.

9

That reminds me of my company TOR (Time Off Reporting) System. It also sucks donkey balls.

To enter a day off you have to log in with your name and password but the password is deleted every three months so you have to request a new one which you get in an email and of course when you sign in you are required to change it to one of your choosing.

Once in you have to click on an absent request. Then you have to click on our divisions absent requests. Then you have to click on request absence. Then you have to choose what kind of absence. Is this a request for time off later or is this time already taken? Then you have to select in a drop down box what type of absence i.e. vacation, sick, dead relative. This takes a second as it seems to refresh the page so even if you continue filling out the form it will erase what you entered. Then you have to pick the start date which again refreshes the page. Then you have to select the start time, refresh, end time, refresh, end date, refresh. Then you have to click next, which gives you a review of the data you entered. If all is okay then you can click submit .

I personally make sure it is all correct before I hit next because to go back means to start all over again.

All this results in an email to yourself and your boss stating you created a request but there is nothing in the email other than a log number that relates to your request. It does not give you a date or time you are requesting. You will have to log in again to review that information.

If you are only requesting one day then you are done but if you are taking several days in a row you have to enter each one separately which sucks on its own but as soon as you hit submit for the first day it takes you back to the main screen and you have to go through all the steps again for every fucking day.

To request a full weeks vacation takes forever.

Why there is even an “Start Date and End Date” is beyond me as it does not really work that way anyway. You can not put 4/21/2008 to 4/25/2008 as the start and end dates as it ignores the start time and end time and will log 24 hours off for each day anyway.

Oh and if you selected a future date you have to log back in later go through all the steps to get to a page that lets you confirm you really did take that time off. If you forget you get an email to remind you that you have unconfirmed absent requests. So not only does it take time to request time it takes time to confirm time.

At least it is slightly better than our PPO (Personal Performance Objective) System. That sucks even worse but at least we only have to touch it once a year.

10

Holy cow. At my last job we’d just stick a post-it note on the deputy director’s door.

11

SomeUserName, I hope you don’t have to do that for weekends.

12

Take solace in the idea that you are paying forward for Jenna Bush’s war in Cuba in 2020.

13

When I pay estimated taxes I use this site They charge me a fee but I expense that at the end of the year. The convenience of being able to pay my estimated taxes in less than a minute using my visa check card is well worth the fee they charge.

I didn’t even know the IRS had a site for that and I have to say that I’m not all that inspired to use it after this thread.

14

Can’t you still just mail them a check every 3 months?

15

Yeah that government system works about as well as most of them.

I’d send a check. Go to IRS.gov and look for 1040-ES forms, 5 minutes later it’s in the mail.

16

Well, yes, I could mail them a check, but I know myself: I’ll forget the mid-year deadlines. It’s easier and better if the money comes out of my account automatically.

17

Do you have to send them you estimatd taxes? Can’t you just arrange for the bank to put a portion or your pay into another account and pay at the end of the year?

18

No, that’s the point of estimates taxes - you have to pay throughout the year. They’re not waiting until next April for their cash. It’s directly analagous to withholding - you have to have ALL of your paychecks withheld, and you can be penalized for under-withholding, even if you pay up the balance at the end of the year. You gots to stay on top of the taxes.

As far as the government is concerned, that April 15th deadline is primarily for filing - everything should have already been paid by then.

19

Jesus! I just went to their site, and for my income, they charge $50 per payment! Thanks, I think I’ll suffer the annoyance and save myself a couple hundred a year. Lucky you, if you can get reimbursed for that sort of thing.