nlbarber

Taxes are done, later than I'd hoped. Much later than they should have been, given that it turned out I had a big refund due. I hate letting the State and federal gov't use my money for free.

Midnight last night I'd managed to get a clean report from TurboTax. I decided to tackle the paper vs. return crosscheck at lunch today, and promptly found I'd skipped inputting a big 1099-INT. The expected refund amounts dropped some, but stayed significant. Then I found that not all the fiddly bits of info needed for the "Foreign Tax Credit" form were showing up on the forms, and that set off a long struggle with TurboTax. Find the approximate place where the data should go in. Answer the same questions you'd answered before (and which TT doesn't retain the answer to). Discover that the missing piece of info should have come from the broker's statement, but didn't get input when I used the automatic import. Got all that straightened out, and then TT found another error (a missing 'explanatory note') before it was happy again.

I filed the federal return online--it's "free", which I assume really means TT is incorporating the fee they could charge in the price of the software. The State return was going to cost $19.95 (discounted from $29.95 or so), and I refused to pay to help Georgia out with its data input. I figured I could easily go home after work, find an envelope, and get the return to a Post Office having extended hours.

This plan did work, barely. I left the office well after 7, got home just before 8. Had to print an envelope, as Georgia only gave me ones for estimated tax payments. Then printed another envelope, with the right address. Discovered that the Briarcliff P.O. wasn't having extended hours, so drove rapidly to downtown Decatur to join the crowd. I just missed the guy who had been taking returns by the drop boxes, as he was headed in for the night. A clerk was working the line in the lobby, though, hand-canceling returns for those of us who didn't want proof of mailing. Got home about 9:20 from all that.

I started the taxes Sunday night. I wanted to start earlier in the day, but Step 1, intall TurboTax on the iMac, proved difficult. It seems TT dropped support for OS X 10.3 this year, and I never upgraded the iMac beyond that. So, decided I could take it to 10.4 (not 10.5, as I would lose my recipe program that runs only in Classic mode if I went to Classic-less 10.5), and set off to buy the system upgrade. An hour and a half later I'd managed that--wandered through the Apple "Federal employees purchasing for themselves" store, found only the version showing was the multi-seat license, called the store support number and got someone who had the same problem and foisted me off on the main Tech Support line. Half an hour on hold, but then I got the very helpful Pete, who spent another half an hour finding the code for a single seat 10.4 (by looking in my purchase history for when I bought it for work) and then completing the purchase. No download available, so it was mailed and will be here next week, probably. I regret being so upright and not just finding an install CD at the office after all that.

Anyway, I temporarily installed TT on the work laptop, got the updates downloaded and installed, and got through the first blast of data entry (W-2, 1099s). I should be working on the one stock sale tonight, but I don't seem to have enough brain. Will wait until tomorrow...or later. Lots of time left, right? Except that the really messy stuff for this year's return is yet to come...

Back in June I got this mysterious letter from the IRS referring to some letter that I don't remember sending them. This one says:

Dear Taxpayer:

We previously sent you a letter concerning your inquiry received May 10, 2006. Although we try to respond quickly, extensive research is often required. At this time we are unable to provide a complete response because:

Due to heavy workload, we have not yet completed our research necessary to resolve your inquiry.

Please allow an additional 45 days for us to obtain the information we need and to let you know what action we are taking....

If only I knew what the heck my inquiry was supposed to be!

At midnight, I had gone through all the Federal and state bits once in TurboTax, which had told me I owed lots of money to each, plus a $76 penalty to the Feds and $48 to the state for underpayment. At that point, $76 sounded pretty cheap to be done, though the extra $48 made me waver. Anyway, I quit for the night.

This morning, it really seemed like a couple of hours would let me check over everything, do the annualized income bit for form 2210 that often gets me out of the penalty, and then I'd be done. And I'd taken the precaution of telling my supervisor that I might not make it in today, and I brought home the info I needed for a conference call this afternoon.

The Federal part didn't really take too much longer than my estimate, not counting the time it took to put TurboTax on the laptop because the iMac, which hasn't been upgraded to Panther yet, can no longer see the printer that's hooked to the laptop. And I reduced the penalty to $36, which doesn't cover my salary for the 2 hours, but it's the principle of the thing that counts. But I then spent more than 4 hours wrestling with the Georgia underpayment form which is mostly not automated in TurboTax. I calculated one set of number for one possible penalty exemption, only to discover I'd done it wrong. Went to the Web and downloaded the full instructions, recalculated, and was told the penalty had jumped from $48 to $87. I took a quick look at the other penalty exemption, decided it was going to take even more time, deleted all the numbers from the form, and took the default penalty. Grrr.

Well, the envelopes have been delivered to the Post Office and hand-canceled, and I'll wait to see if the e-filing comes back with any problems before filling out the forms to get all the rebates back from Intuit. So, I'm done, kind of, unless something bounces, or the IRS finds the 3 numbers (totalling $4) that I omitted to avoid filling out 4 or more additional forms, or.... Double grrr.