Well, there is nothing like tax season to get everyone’s passions rolling. All procrastination aside, I would like to proudly point out that this year I accomplished my taxes 100% on my own.... hopefully this wont backfire on me (please cross your fingers)
2 years ago, Rheagan and I did the H&R Block thing. They spent all of 10 minutes going through our stuff. I felt like they were making way to much money for the effort that they put into our return. Shucks! The fee was almost the same size as the return. This made me feel stupid.
So last year I went into cheep-skate/John Wayne mode and decided to try to do the taxes on my own. As you might have guessed, this didn’t workout at all. You would think that a levelheaded guy with a college education would be able to figure out how to file taxes. This, alas, is not the case.
I started out by going to the IRS website and downloading the hated 1040. This seemed simple enough at first, but then you see that there are almost 50 versions of the form 1040 (1040A, 1040EZ, 1040X, 1040T, 1040r2d2, 1040yourasuckerifyoutrytodoyourtaxesonyourown, and so on). I spent a good hour or two searching though the IRS’s labyrinthine web site just trying to find some kind of guidance on which form to use. Finally, with a guess, I went with the basic form 1040 (the one with out a suffix).
I started going through the 1040 and it would say things like “to complete this section, see page 78”. See page 78 of what? My 1040 only had 2 pages. I could only assume that this ‘78’ was referring to some directions. I did a couple of searches for form 1040 instructions. With the search: ‘1040 directions 2002’, The IRS internal search engine pulled out no less then 150,000 matches. The first 50+ of which did nothing for me.
Turns out that the IRS web site is truly useless to the average citizen. If a person doesn’t already know tax-ease, then he or she will be hopelessly lost. (Although, I must admit that the IRS site is somewhat friendlier this year than last.)
This frustration continued until I finally gave up and filed for an automatic extension. A few months later I picked up the 2002 version of TurboTax on sale. TT made things much easier. It explained all of the forms and walked me though them. The important part is that I learned enough to do the taxes all by myself for the 2003 effort.
It is amazing to me that we have to spend potentially very large amounts of money in the private sector (H&R Block etc.) just to fulfill the basic civic duty of accurately paying taxes. This should be easier.
If you still haven’t mailed in your tax return, you still have a few hours to get with your buddy in Hawaii…where the post office is still open for a few hours.
Posted by paul at April 15, 2004 10:26 PM