The I.R.S. is stalking me again

Dang. Nothing like sorting through the mail the day you get home from a great trip and finding an indecipherable letter from the IRS in there, saying you owe them a thousand smackers.

I got a letter like this from them last year, right around the time Mark went flippy floppy. I blew all the deadlines for responding of course, seeing as how we were busy doing the brain cancer thing. But it all worked out in the end. They were pretty nice about it, actually. (They needed docs to prove that the 10,000 smacks I took out of the 401k actually went to the first purchase of a home).

This year it's another documentation thing again, I think. I put 3,000 smacks into an IRA thinking I'd be able to get a tax deduction on it, but it turns out that because of some rule I didn't know about, the fact that I'd had the option of using the USC retirement plan for the 1 month of that year meant that I didn't qualify for the deduction. So I took the 3,000 smacks back out of the IRA -- I think the very same night. Anyways, I did 'splain all that in the return for that year, and hopefully, if I 'splain it again I can dodge the thousand dollar blood suck the IRS is trying to pull off here.

It's amazing to me how much time they spend nickel and diming someone like me who has paid and paid a huge percentage of my income without complaint all these years. I wish instead of spending their staff time on a small timer like me, they'd figure out a way to tax rich people who get away with paying almost nothing. Then they wouldn't have to try to keep the fire trucks running off finding crumbs in the crevices of the returns of average blokes like me.