Taxpayers in Nine States and the District of Columbia File with Different Centers this Year – IRS’s annual re-shuffling of the Service Centers.  The annoying thing is that, although our tax software usually gets this right for the current tax year, the previous years programs are still set up for the old Service Centers, so we need to remember to manually over-ride them.   

This latest change affects taxpayers currently living in the following states:

Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
Vermont
Virginia
Indiana
Michigan
Alabama
District of Columbia

Remember, it’s where you live when you are filing the tax return that matters; not where you were living during the tax year of the 1040.

From Late Night with Jimmy Fallon via NewsMax:

During a recent interview on C-SPAN, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said he doesn’t do his own taxes because he finds “the tax code complex.” That’s like a surgeon saying, “You guys, blood grosses me out. So I don’t wanna . . . ”

From The Hill:

IRS commissioner doesn’t file his own taxes – This is actually a misleading headline because the writer doesn’t seem to understand the difference between preparing tax returns and filing them with IRS.  The Commissioner does file tax returns, but he uses a paid professional to prepare them.  As embarrassing as this may be for the person in charge of enforcing this country’s tax laws, it doesn’t seem to be as bad as a Treasury Secretary or the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who both intentionally cheat on their tax returns by omitting thousands of dollars of income.

 

It’s long been a stupid cliche when athletes and others promise to give an impossible 110 or more percent effort towards their goals.  I found it funny that IRS is only promising to try to answer 71 percent of calls from the tax paying public and that is considered a great goal. 

If you are lucky enough to have your phone call answered after their expected average wait time of 12 minutes, there is then the issue of whether you will get the correct answers.  The odds of that happening are most likely going to be the same as in the past; 33% to 50%.  It’s like a lottery.

Of course, the double standard is firmly in place.  If you were to file a tax return with the stated goal of being 71% accurate in your figures, guess what hell you will be faced with.

If that were acceptable, the fine print info above the taxpayer’s signature on Page 2 of the 1040 would need to be modified to read as follows.

Under penalties of perjury, I declare that I have examined this return and accompanying schedules and statements, and to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are 71% true, correct, and complete. Declaration of preparer (other than taxpayer) is based on 71% of all information of which preparer has any knowledge.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this IRS announcement.

1.  Those people who foolishly try to save a few bucks by not utilizing the services of professional tax preparers will be risking their necks even more than ever.

2.  This same philosophy of striving for a 71% rate of answering the phone is what we can expect for our health-care after that entire segment of our society is socialized and IRS employees are put in charge of administering our medical treatment. A 29% death rate will be considered as a success.