November 15, 2010

A Little Victory

After six months of back-and-forth, the Internal Revenue Service has decided that M. and I do not owe an additional $250 federal income tax for last year.

Not a huge amount, but, damn it, we did not owe it!

If we had prepared our own tax returns and had not had our tax accountant to hold our hands through this process, we might have thought that we really did owe more money. How many people just pay up?

But he generated some "Prove it, you stupid, clumsy bureaucrats!" letters, and the IRS backed down. He probably has the letter template in his computer and just inserts the clients' names.

I used to tell my writing student that "the IRS hates freelancers." Funny that this happened the first full year of my return to freelance work.

We don't make very much money, but we make it in complicated ways, filing a federal tax return fat with Schedule This and Worksheet That.

2 comments:

Janeen said...

They've tried the same thing with us for each of the last three years. We file similarly complicated returns and use an accountant.

Ironically when he recalculated the '09 return - at IRS's request - our accountant discovered that they owed us money. Even though it was a very small amount, it made me very happy!

Coloradocasters said...

Good to see you stand your ground against such a huge entity and win. I judge my entire life by victory and defeat. The amount may be small but the size of the foe makes this a huge victory in my book. Well done.