Audits and Other Risks of Doing Your Own Taxes

I must confess right now that I have never been audited (knock on wood); however I have been filing taxes for more than half my life. It all started the year I turned sixteen and got my first job. I had to file taxes for the first time that following February and my mom thought I could handle it myself. After all, the form wasn’t that hard, there were only something like fifteen questions. As things go though, nothing could have been more difficult.

I began with a pen and the form – that was my first mistake. After the second attempt to change a total written in pen I crumpled up that form and threw it out. I was smarter with the second form; I decided to use a pencil. However, when the total showed that I owed two thousand dollars when I had only made that much, I knew I had to try again. After the third attempt when I tore the paper while trying to erase yet another miscalculation, my mother threw up her hands in disgust and brought me with her to H&R Block when she had hers done. The lady there had in done in two seconds flat, without a pencil even! She was so bold she went straight for the pen. I was in awe of her prowess.

Determined to become more like that woman, I attempted my own taxes the next year and the year after and the year after that. Each time though, I continued to make mistakes and become so frustrated that I would have to go back to H&R Block, miserably holding my little bag of papers that they needed. The year I turned nineteen though was the very last year that I had a professional fill out my tax forms. That year I somehow actually owed two thousand dollars and I was sure that I could do much better than that. Also, that was the year that tax preparation software became more affordable for the common Joe, or Jane as the case may be.

TurboTax became my new best friend. One year though, I decided to try TaxCut, what a mistake that was! After trying and failing miserably due to having to hunt down alternate forms and go to the IRS website to read directions, I decided that my loyalty would remain with TurboTax. I became so proficient at doing my own taxes that all of my family members began to come to me after their own failed attempts at filling out forms. I could find deductions that even H&R Block didn’t know existed. I was the queen of the world. Then disaster struck. A couple of different family members decided that they would try this miracle software that I was using and lo and behold, they realized that they too could file their own taxes and not have to wait for me to wade through the stacks of papers on my desk in order to file theirs.

Now I only have to do my taxes and my baby sister’s taxes. What a far cry from the twenty or thirty that I used to do. My skills at finding new deductions is waning because I no longer have a multitude of people to steal ideas from or find new ways to lessen their burdens. I live in constant fear though that my creativity with filing may one day result in that dreaded phone call, “Mrs. Jones this is the IRS and we are auditing the last seven years of your taxes. We would audit more, but that is all the law allows us. We think that you owe us two million dollars.” Not that I have even made two million dollars in my lifetime, but we all know how that terrorist mob that hides behind the initials IRS works.

It is time to begin again, all of my forms and my husband’s forms are in and we are hoping for a large refund again this year because our television is dying a slow death. The screen shrinks and gets fuzzy then enlarges and clears up then slowly shrinks back down. Of course this only happens during the shows that we really want to watch. Let Martha Stewart show up though and the picture looks as good as it did the day we bought the television. I need a new computer, preferably a laptop because mine keeps giving me fatal errors (which I can only assume are because of all the tax forms on it begging the IRS to audit them), oh yeah, and food. Food would be good. Anyway, I am off to buy my new copy of TurboTax and hope that this isn’t the year I pick up the phone and hear that voice telling me to gather all my receipts and forms and to prepare my family for my incarceration because I put .02 instead of .20 on line 25 of form 1040 in 1998.