I have a similar tax day rant about the USPS. On April 14th, I received a “return to sender” on the tax filing I sent to the State of Illinois, saying that the address was “incomplete” and that they were “unable to forward”. I took it in to the local post office along with the instructions from the Illinois Department of Revenue, asked if they could explain what I did wrong. Three people looked at it & said it was fine. I asked if perhaps the State of Illinois moved & did not leave a forwarding address somehow. They just smiled & put my envelope inside one of theirs & addressed it again. They said that perhaps it would be taken more seriously if it came from them.
FWIW, I know that they are just human, too. It was just frustrating to have to go stand in line at the post office on tax day because someone looked at an envelope & decided that because there were only 2 lines on the address, it must be wrong somehow.
Unless of course you have investment income… we put some money into a mutual fund for my son, many years ago, and now the income from it is just high enough that he owes a few dollars (< 50) in tax.
I thought I’d file his online for free, but nope - because of the investment income, I’d have to pay $$. It was cheaper to efile it ourselves via our downloaded copy of Turbo Tax.
I have to say I’m with Cheesesteak on this one. Even though I’m one of those people who wait and stress and then heave a big sigh of relief on the last day.
From my pov, the IRS did give you a reasonable amount of time to file your taxes. W2s are required to be out by Jan. 31, so you effectively have two and a half months to make sure you have the necessary paperwork to file. If they gave you more time, you’d probably be here complaining about how you couldn’t find a PO open past 11pm on June 31. You waited, so you have yourself to blame for your dilemma.
OTOH, I will agree with you that a few PSAs for late filers on what’s available in their area regarding filing and mailing would be a nice gesture and very helpful for quite a few people. How you could find a way to complain about e-file ($36 is well worth the peace of mind, IMHO) surprises me. I just paid nearly $200 for my peace of mind to have someone else prepare and e-file my returns. I’ll be scrimping elsewhere to cover that.
For those of you who cannot understand why we do this, it’s very simple. We don’t like filing taxes. It’s complicated, it’s intimidating, and it’s sometimes frustrating. People who procrastinate excessively (and, most certainly to their own detriment), like myself, put off doing things we don’t like to do. I’m not justifying the behavior, I’m just explaining it.
I feel like an idiot every year that I procrastinate and one day I will beat that demon in me. But in the meantime, I try to be very courteous and appreciative of the people who are cramming on Apr. 15 to make sure I meet my obligations. So, I know this is the pit, but I’ll send thanks out anyway to the very nice tax preparer at HRB who spent two hours with us doing two years of returns and the fine people at the PO standing out there on the street with efficient smiles and thank you’s for taking my returns.
FTR, Cheesesteak, I’m never shocked at the dilemmas I find myself in and resulting stress, through no fault of anyone else but me. Dismayed, certainly. Irritated at myself, absolutely. Shocked, not so much.
The most amazing thing to me about the tax/post thing in America is that you actually have to purchase a stamp to post in your compulsory tax return.
The United States is the only country i’ve ever lived where a mandatory government form like the tax return does not come with a postage-paid envelope.
For the record, the Post Office on West John Street in Hicksville by the train station was open until midnight. It’s actually open until 11 most nights, which I find amazingly convenient (particularly after living in Astoria where the local post office closed at 5:30 - and opened at 9:00. Really, who the Hell can get to the post office between 9 and 5:30? Only people who don’t work days.)
Blaming the government for your own failure to plan ahead is still ridiculous, though. If you have some sort of moral objection to filing before April 15 (and, weirdly, I know some people who do), then by all means mail it on the morning of April 15. But not getting around to mailing it until after the time post offices close is just your own disorganization.*
And if you didn’t bother to actually start filling out the paperwork until yesterday, then you’re definitely an idiot.
*I say this speaking as a formerly disorganized person who has done precisely this in the past.
Somewhat off topic, but my step-mother believes that because the people/companies/government that she owes money to have more money than her, they don’t deserve to get paid by her. So she pays all of her bills late even when she has the money. Yes, this is insane.
Check around for cheaper alternatives to TurboTax. I got pissed off at Intuit this year when they drastically cut back the number of returns that could be filed per copy without purchasing extras to only 2 (this in QuickTax, the Canadian equivalent of TurboTax), and found an equally good software that allowed me to prepare and e-file up to 8 federal/provincial returns for half the cost.
I’m going to call you out for waiting to last minute, and be really daring by not fucking myself.
I wonder if the world will end?
Waiting until 8pm is fucking stupid regardless of what the Post Office is doing. If you get out of work at 7:30pm, here’s an idea - stick it in the mail on your damn lunch break.
Well now I feel like a real jerk for paying TurboTax $35.95 for my federal tax and $39.95 for my Oregon state tax return. And yes, I made less than $50K. My stupid Oregon income was like $2,000 and I got a refund of $19 and had to pay $39.95 to TurboTax! Stupid.
I mailed our tax returns on the morning of the 14th - there was nobody else in the post office lobby at 6:15 AM as I was on my way to work.
We owed (quite a bit of) money, so I was in no hurry to write and send those checks.
I thought about e-filing, but balked pretty hard at paying $36 for the privilege of making my returns (state+fed) easier for them to deal with. If paper returns are what you guys want to incentivize, then here you fuckin’ go. Knock yourselves out…
I just wanted to let you know there are other options than paying while still being able to submit online and/or use the program and then use their numbers on a paper form.
That, and I was trying to be Dave Barryesqe with the reference to a joke at the end of the post made about a joke made in the beginning of the post. Looks like I’m not as funny past my bedtime as I thought.
Speaking of waiting until April 15…I was in a meeting this morning with our pension company, who happens to be part of the same company as our CPA firm. Every year, the accountants leave at 2:00 pm on April 15 to have a party.
The pension consultant said that someone came in at 4:00 yesterday (4/15) with his tax information and was angry because there was no one there to do his taxes. It’s a professional CPA firm, not Jackson Hewitt.
