Taxasaur — A prehistoric beast who comes every spring to devour your money after chasing you through a twisting maze of complexity and impossible-to-understand bureaucratic legalese. The Taxasaur is tedious and tenacious, taking no prisoners and wearing a thick armor made up of forms called the “1040ES” and the super protective “Unrecaptured Section 1250 Gain Worksheet.”
Wo! “Unrecaptured” doesn’t even make sense.
Taxasaurs try to confuse you with puzzling riddles that have no correct answers such as, “Subtract line 55 from 45. If Line 55 is more than line 45, enter -0-. If less than line 45, but more than the square root of 86, send your left kidney to the U.S. Treasury.”
That wily Taxasaur!
The bushes shake. The land rumbles. Little furry critters scurry for cover, and I consider moving to Canada.
Why are taxes so complicated? Why, as civilized and generally intelligent people, have we created a system so impossible that it’s a wonder taxes get paid at all? Doesn’t anyone at the IRS also have to fill these things out? Don’t they scratch their own heads and say, “You know, building the Space Shuttle wasn’t this hard”? Or is it a big scam — a joke on the taxpayer, and one day some genius will realize that the answer, no matter how you fill it out, is always $432.26?
And I don’t even do my own taxes. My family has a commercial partnership in Tampa and we hire someone to do it for us. The accountant just sends me an organizer with dozens and dozens of questions, but I still can’t figure it out.
I answer “no” to everything because the questions are all like:
• Have you ever been a part of a soybean co-op?
• Have you ever herded Icelandic goats on a bison farm in Montana?
• Do you have any gambling losses?
Gambling losses? Are you kidding me? Gambling losses are deductible? You get a tax break for losing money at the track?
Is that the “vice break”? What other breaks are there?
• Have you ever sold illegal firearms at a loss?
• Have any sudden price drops hurt sales of moonshine?
• Have any recent bank robberies not yielded as high a gain as expected?
I fill out my organizer like a kid who fell asleep during a multiple choice final exam. You wake up five minutes before the proctor calls time and fill in ‘C’ for every box you can.
Either I will get a big return this year or I will owe $52,000. It’s that simple. I don’t know what I’m doing.
Although, it could be worse. My future sister-in-law came over the other night to do her taxes on our computer. She was using Turbo Tax, a handy software program that lets you avoid going to a professional or struggling through a 1040 on your own.
Why screw up your taxes on paper when you can screw them up online?
And at first, she really screwed them up.
“What!!!” came the scream from the other room, loud enough that a wall buckled and light bulbs popped. “This says I owe $1,800!”
We gave her oxygen and she tried over. It was much more favorable this time.
But her troubles weren’t over. Turns out to finish up your taxes, you need to check back the next night by reloading the disc into the computer and logging in again. Only thing was, when she went home that night, she found that the youngest dog had climbed up on the living room table and devoured the disk. Nothing else, just her tax disk. And she bled all over it just for good measure.
“She could have eaten any of your brother’s stuff, but she ate my taxes!” Holly cried.
Bit by the Taxasaur literally.
The Taxasaur will get you every time, unless, of course, you blew it all at the track last year. And in that case, you’re gonna’ get a big return. Just make sure you fill out line 55.