Tax Day Blues

I am all in favor of paying taxes -- I know it pays for lots of good things that I enjoy in my day-to-day life (roads ... schools ... national security... health care too, apparently). In fact, based on life in underfunded Oregon (which has no sales tax) I'd be happy to pay more taxes.

Not that I'm paying much for 2009, having earned less than a bad year in graduate school.  However, I do owe a minimal amount, which I can pay, and which will be deducted from my checking account tomorrow by Good Old Uncle Sam.

I use TurboTax for my taxes, and have done for ten or more years, ever since I stopped needing the one-page 1040 EZ.  This year, TurboTax failed me.  Over the last couple of days I have carefully double-checked all my numbers (I have a business, so I have lots of numbers; this year they are little numbers). I printed out the full set of forms to keep for documentation. I e-filed the forms (electronically) to the government.  Then I read through the full set of forms.

There's a strange $500 deduction that TurboTax added in to my numbers.  It added an extra three forms in the printed version, but (as far as I remember) I didn't okay or opt-in to any of them in the "Easy Step" user-friendly bit of the program.  After two hours of puzzling, I've figured out what happened (I have not tracked down why TurboTax did this): the program "helped" me by carrying over the loss on some stocks that I sold in 2008 (which weren't enough of a loss to be significant to my taxes in 2008), and it added in some Alternative Minimum Tax dollars (that I don't qualify for).

This doesn't change the bottom line at all. I owe the same amount to the government.  But it does mean that I have to fill out some other forms (Amendation Forms), print those out and snail mail those in in paper form.  Something I didn't want to have to do -- all those forms! (I am a hearty adopter of e-filing technologies.) And now my tax forms for the state, county and city (which all depend upon the federal forms, and require copies of said) have to be reprinted, reorganized, and mailed.

I can only be thankful that I hadn't already submitted those smaller jurisdiction's taxes.  I'm only out about 40 sheets of printed paper and 3-4 hours of extra time -- all because TurboTax was trying to save me money!

Thanks for letting me rant for a moment.  The goal was to get taxes out of the way so I could catch you all up on last week's Kitchen Remodeling Progress (which is still happening, but at a slower pace for a while).  Maybe I'll get an entry out tonight or tomorrow.

Here's a teaser: we got the heating to the bathroom re-done!