IrishOboe

For some strange reason I do not abhor filing taxes.  It’s a bit like working on a difficult puzzle and I don’t earn enough to make paying a percentage that painful and I’m not thinking about the money when I’m trying to decipher the crazy maze of instructions.  I think I’m moderately smart and well able to read English and yet I always seem to mess something up.

Knowing I’d been in Switzerland during tax 2006 filing time I figured out what I’d owe and paid it plus a generous amount in January then rested easy on my overseas extension until returning in the Summer when I went over with the new rules and discovered they’d changed how overseas income is taxed so my Japanese income was taxed a few hundred dollars more under the new rules (lovely discovery, it was).  Instead of getting the refund I expected I paid 155 dollars more.  I checked to see if I would owe interest or fees and satisfied myself that I did not.  Wrong!  A few weeks into my second time in Switzerland and my faithful secretary (SursumCorda) sent me scans of a letter from the IRS looking for some trivial amount of money under $10.  It’s a waste of their time, but I suppose they have their reputation as stake.  Never mind that they got four months of interest on $700, they want me to pay the 4 months of interest on $155.  Jolly fair of them, isn’t it?

Now do you see why I’ve been blogging so much?  I had that and other phone calls looming over me.  I’m better than I was, but put enough phone calls on my to do list and I still run away and hide.

The IRS lady was quite nice and proposed that maybe I was looking at the tax penalty rules for Estimated Tax not for actual tax.  Indeed, she was right, though I haven’t bothered to figure out where I was supposed to find the right section as it’s still not obvious to me.  Well, kind institution that it is, the IRS allows fees to be backed out but never no never interest.  I will get a new bill that reflects this change that they will have to send to Switzerland and then I will have to send them a check for $5.50.  At least the USPS makes out on the deal.  God bless Amerika – I mean America.  I started speaking German to the IRS lady at one point, too . . .