Adventures In Tax Preparing

When I read the weather forecast for tomorrow, it was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears. Winter storm warning! Heavy snow expected! Total snow accumulations between 10 and 13 inches! Winds gusting as high as 45 mph!

I am so over this fuckin' winter.

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Also, my heart just broke, broke, broke for one of yesterday's tax clients.

Recent immigrant from Jamaica. Has a wife and a five-year-old nonverbal daughter with ADHD. Nobody in the Sullivan County education system has ever sat down with him to explain the special education system or the IEP process. I tried! But I don't actually know very much about it except that it exists.

But that wasn't his main problem.

No, his main problem was that in 2023, he falsified his income records, only he did it the opposite way most people do: He claimed more income than he actually made.

He did this because he wanted to buy a house.

This ill-advised deception resulted in the IRS nailing him for unpaid taxes on income he hadn't actually made. More than $10,000 in unpaid taxes.

He came in yesterday with a single W2, but the bill for Schlock services came to $450 because he's eligible for EIC & the child credit.

$450! For something it would have taken half an hour to do at a library by himself. It's not that difficult!

Or he could have found a TaxBwana site, and they would have done it for him for free.

I wish I could have suggested that to him! But Schlock would have drummed me out on the spot, and sadly, my own finances are so perilous right now I need the Schlock revenue.

$450 is a significant chunk of cash for someone like this client. He only made $45,000 last year, which is only marginally more than I made, and I consider myself poor. And he is supporting a family of three!

Yes, he's due to get more than $5 K back from the gub'mint, but he's not going to see a penny of it, since the IRS is gonna nab the entire amount to apply it to the back taxes on imaginary income he never made.

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He also wanted to file his 2024 taxes, but he doesn't have a W2 for 2024 on account of he was running his own small carpentry firm that year and neglected to keep track of the mostly cash payments he was receiving.

"But it's the same amount as the 2023 W2!" he told me, pushing that form toward me. "Just use this! Everything's the same except the year!"

"I can't do that," I said. "What you're going to need to do is pull together a 1099-NEC documenting any cash or credit card payments you received. And a 1099-K for third-party app payments. You'll have to sit down and dig into your bank statements—"

"But that bank account is closed!" he cried.

There was some horrible story around the closure of that bank account. He started telling me, but I didn't want to listen. Giving him advice was wayyyyyy over my Schlock pay grade. It wouldn't have been if I were still a TaxBwana, of course.

The advice I wanted to give him was: Find a legal clinic where someone offers tax advice to struggling small business owners.

Really nice guy, and bought into the America, land of opportunity! propagana 1,000%.

Yes, America can be a land of opportunity. But you need a map. And he didn't have one.

And I wasn't being paid to give him one.

And that broke my heart.

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In news of the Work In Progress: Only one more scene to write and then I will be finished with Chapter 6, which means I will be finished with Part 1!!!

The Big Thing I am trying to do here is a return to the brittle, bright, wisecracking language of the very first chapter to achieve a kind of full-circle effect.

We'll see if I can pull that off.