Forensic Tax Accounting

TaxBwana was so grueling yesterday that upon coming home, I fell into a coma-like sleep that lasted two hours, and when I awakened, I was good for absolutely nothing.

So I watched multiple episodes of the All Creatures Great and Small reboot.

I’m not sure why I got so wiped out, except that it was a Catholic Charities day, and I suspect that Catholic Charities building is just riddled with mold because I hacked and gurgled like Keats on his deathbed. (I am so sensitive to mold that I have often considered renting myself out to building inspectors who get paid the Big Buck$ for mold detection.)

Also, I’d spent two hours deciphering the various illegibly scribbled pieces of paper and Official Documents That Had Seen Better Days belonging to Wilma Runzie (not her real name), who wanted me to do her 2022 and 2021 tax returns.

This was a real adventure in forensic tax accounting!

But I did manage to get her the $350 New York State Homeowner Tax Rebate.

Did I mention the screaming three-year-old?

There was a screaming three-year-old. He belonged to the client I saw after Wilma Runzie.

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At the end of the day, Doug Rugg cornered me in the parking lot. Doug Rugg is the TaxBwana who QA’d the returns I did for Wilma Runzie.

“I mean, I am just absolutely speechless,” Doug Rugg said. I could see his respect for me had quadrupled. Hitherto, his remarks to me had been confined to, You forgot to put the zero in under state tax payments when somebody hadn’t had anything taken out for state taxes. “How do people like that manage to survive?”

I shrugged. “I figure she’s pretty far gone in dementia and has no one to look after her. I mean—she worked for Verizon for 30 years, and they’re still paying her health benefits, so she must have been middle management. And she owns her own home. So, she wasn’t always like this.

“It’s tragic, really. She knows paying taxes is something respectable people do. And she’s trying to maintain her respectability.”

This thought had not occurred to him before, and I could see him turning it slowly around in his mind.

He wanted to talk more about it.

But I did not!

“Bye-eeeeee!” I said brightly and hopped into my car.

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The actor who plays James Herriott in the rebooted All Creatures Great and Small looks startlingly like my old friend Bob Benjamin.

Which you actually can’t see from this photograph taken nearly 40 years ago:



But I like the photograph.

So, I’m posting it anyway.

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Given the fatigue and the hacking, I did a COVID test this morning.

But no COVID.