Grab Your Ankles

It's tax time again. Once more, I toil away searching for anything that will keep me from owing more taxes. I usually have to pay to get them filed, never a freebie for me. I spend hours going through the website reading anything that will help me. Regardless, I always get screwed.

I refuse to go back any further than this year. I go to turbo tax and use the free option. I get through 2 W-2 forms and get to my 1099. It lists every 1099 form but the one I have. Figures doesn't it? By this time, I have spent over an hour to get this far. So whats a putz to do?

I clear all fields and start again. Now I spend another 30 minutes to find the right program to use. This will cost me a cool 50 bucks but I have to file right? At least for 50 dollars it will fill in the forms for me if I enter the employers identification number and even enter the adjusted gross income from 2007 for me. I think I have a good deal here ....right!

You know that smelly stuff that rolls downhill? Well I am always in it's way and usually end up knee deep in it. Let me digress, I had to enter all the information again, since all my employers wouldn't pull up. Went through 50 gillion questions that wouldn't pertain to 1/100000000 of the net population of the freaking universe. Then the one question that just completely fried me, "Did you receive a stimulus check for the year of 2008?" Well I can honestly say everyone I know received one with the exception of one person ... me.

I licked my wounds and put on a brave face and answered honestly, "no". I finally finished and then went to e-file. Sounds like it's all going good doesn't it? Nah. Instead of loading my adjusted gross income, Turbo Tax tells me where I can find it. Now, I am already fried about the stimulus check, had to spend 50 bucks with the promise of all this new cool automated frills so I don't have to do a thing. What can you do? I have to file my taxes. So I manually pulled up my adjusted gross income from 2007 thus entering it in the system and creating a 5 digit pin and sending my file through E-Space to Uncle Sam.

This was now 4 1/2 hours since the start of my yearly adventure, thankful that it's over ... sure! A few hours later I receive an email stating my tax file was rejected. Now I am not one that takes rejection well. So I go back to the website to make corrections through an automated system that should not allow mistakes in the first place.

I am thinking at this point that possibly I mis-keyed a number, misspelled a name, entered a space where I shouldn't have. Nope. The government says I received a stimulus check. Now I know I didn't, but have you ever argued with a computer? So I have to enter the amount of the check that I didn't get, just so that I can file on time. Do I shoot for the three hundred and do I enter that amount minus the tax they didn't take out, or go for the six hundred dollar stimulus payment I didn't get, minus the taxes that wasn't taken out. Damn, tax time is rough isn't it?

Lets just say, this took some time. I finally found that I didn't receive a 600 dollar stimulus that I have to give back now, that I never received in the first place. God Bless America. And you wonder why this country is in such a financial mess.

Needless to say I am not done with this thing. It isn't even the money,it's the principle of the whole thing. If I was the I.R.S. and they were me, ... well I would finally have the last laugh.