I had a really crappy day at work with the usual catfight between two account managers who don’t like each other, etc. Then I get a call and my wife had just opened the mailbox and there’s a letter from the IRS. And it says that we owe $33,000 + penalties and interest. This would be completely out of the blue, we filed our taxes back in March and have had no correspondence since. This isn’t good.
There is no possible way we actually owe that money. We use a CPA and our taxes rarely vary by more than a few hundred dollars, so there is no way we could suddenly have underpaid $30k and no one caught it until October. But guess what? With the IRS you have to prove THEM wrong.
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to the CPA we go… Luckily, she agreed to see is tonight, but her comment was ominous: “Well, this will be fun…”
But wait, there’s more! So I’m getting ready to go to the CPA’s office after work and I look out the window just in time to see our cat chase a fox across the yard. Yes, you read that right.
So basically what you have here is your typical 18 pound tomcat with a Napoleon complex in hot pursuit of a wild predator about 3 times his size situation. I think we’ve all can identify with this, right? Every sign pointed to the fact that this would not end well. Some intervention on my part was going to be required. So here’s me chasing the cat who is chasing the fox and to make this even stupider the cat seems to be gaining on the fox.
Guys, I have to tell you that I kind of had an out-of-body experience at this point. I’m running through the Johnson’s yard and around the corner of the house and the cat and fox are gone. Oh sh!t. I looked for the cat and about 4 houses over here comes the Big Cat walking back to me all puffed up and winded, but otherwise fine and he comes over and grabs my pants leg which is what he does when he wants someone to pick him up. I end up carrying the damn fox-chasing cat a block and a half home because he’s too tired.
Now of to the CPA we go to hopefully avoid being jailed by the IRS for non payment of taxes we non owed. 2 hours on the phone with the IRS produced the stunningly obvious result that our filing matched the return they had on file and nothing was owed. The IRS employee on the line kept referring to the problem as a “math error” so often that I had another out-of-body experience…
We finally gained agreement and got a confirmation that there was an IRS error and we did not owe the $30k that we never owed in the first place. Mrs Grouse gave the Big Cat a stern talking to about chasing fox and she said he’s on board with not doing that again for a while.
I need a drink.
Grouse
