April, Come She Will (Despite Our Wishes To The Contrary)

April is the traditional month of get your freaking taxes done already.

While we were in lockdown some politicians had got together and sold the central post office building on 8th Avenue so Penn Station could be extended into it, thus ruining the only upside to Tax Day; watching the crowds of people sitting on the steps at 8:30pm scribbling out their 1040s for all they were worth, trying to get it done before the post office closed its multi-banked revolving doors at 9pm. Seeing people sitting around waiting for Bloody Long Island Railroad trains is no special treat, it being such a common occurence.

Turbotax told me I owed money to NY State. I double and triple checked, but ever since the tax code changes made by that nice President Trump I've been having to pay NY State instead of getting a refund, like I did for the previous gosh-knows how many years.

Brief explanation time: My place of work's payroll department has proved incapable of properly withholding from my paycheck while simultaneously deploying a cadre of personnel who refuse to believe they could possibly make any sort of mistake, hanging up the phone if one should suggest the idea merely because the Internal Revenue send one threatening letters out of the blue in spite of the fact that one is a married man with a kid, claiming to be single with no dependents¹. To offset the arrival of hate mail from the IRS I have, for well over a decade, instructed the payroll department to overwithhold from my pay to a usurious degree.

This, which should be a simply paper W4 form stating "please withhold an extra XXX dollars per month etc", is a stupidly hard automated form mandated by HRA that forces one to work out a bi-weekly version of the necessary amount based on net wages, then pro-rate for wherever we are in the fiscal year and AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!

Each year I would normaly receive a quite large refund from the Feds, a not-small one from NY State, and a reasonable one from NYC, paying me back the amount I had carefully calculated was really needed to ensure no-one would start talking about paying quarterly estimated taxes again, then doubled.

This year I got a smaller, but still large, refund from the Feds², a demand for a few hundred dollars from NY State (with menaces) and a refund from NYC that all-but matched the demand from NY State.

Given that the NYC tax withholdings are mediated through NY State, one wonders why the "arrears" in column one caused so much angst to the tax assessor part of Turbotax when it was clear they already had monies to which they thought they were entitled labelled "collected by NYC".

So with a contemptuous sneer at the suggestion to file "vouchers" and quarterly taxes - the IRS have my money, all they are entitled to within a few dollars more or less, it's not my job to watch which shoebox they keep it in - I e-filed and made tea.

1. The usual way of making the sums work↑
2. Who somehow never get round to thanking me for the interest-free loan . I digress↑