The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This past week I had a small argument with friends regarding the Tax Man, the Internal Revenue Service, no doubt universally hated and recently under orders from the Prez to drastically cut staff. Probably most of my fellow citizens are happy as punch those government workers will be getting their pink slips. But not me. I figure the less auditors looking at the returns of the ultra-wealthy and the corporations, the less revenue is pulled in and eventually us peasants will be asked to make up the slack. Call me cynical and send me to bed without my supper of gruel.

My friends’ point of view was more on the order that the IRS was a vast network of mindless computers searching for the mistakes the accountants they had hired had made, probably necessitating the dreaded audit. They asked, in fact, did I trust my own accountant. They no longer had faith in theirs, not after their last audit, and wondered if we’d ever had one ourselves.

Hell, no, I said, I don’t trust our accountant!! Our accountant is me. He runs the numbers for our personal taxes and for my business, fills out mucho forms, everything from Self-employment tax, Schedules B, C, D and X, the 1040, Schedule 1 and a couple more I don’t remember —– oh right, our rental property, no longer rented.

My friends were gobsmacked we weren’t red-flagged. I kind of am too, tell you the truth. But … here’s the thing. Nearly every year the IRS informs us we’ve made an error on our tax forms. And except for once, maybe twice at most where they billed us a hundred or two hundred bucks, we get a fat check back for a thousand here, 4000 there, 7000 last year and this year 1600. They even pay us interest!

So my take is that these IRS employees are looking after us, they’re definitely on our side. They could have kept their algorithmic mouths shut and we’d never be the wiser. Instead, they restored my faith in Government. Although … I can’t say it did for my friends. Like I tell em: do your own taxes — they’ll take pity on the ignorant, the math-challenged and the poor. You’ll be way better off and … you’ll have a new friend.