Filing Income Tax Is Like a Confession
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published April 10, 1979
4/5/2016
Like you, I trust, I have at last finished making out my income tax return, thus getting out of the way what is for me the most harassing, frustrating and nerve-wracking task of the year.
Filling out an income tax form is something akin to making a confession. And it is curious that I can never approach the matter without a vague feeling of dread.
Perhaps you feel the same way. One of my greatest troubles is the matter of expenses and though I constantly call the IRS for guidance, they are not often able to help me.
Take the matter of paper, for instance. I buy the stuff by the ream and take it up to my office and so it should be perfectly simple to just add up the number of reams I have bought and deduct the amount as a legitimate expense.
So it would be, except for my grandchildren. They visit me quite often and they know that I am an inexhaustible source of paper. So they ask me for a few sheets on which to draw or practice writing (I have forbidden them all sternly to take up writing as a profession).
But, of course, the paper they use is not tax deductible. Well, let me plainly and publicly confess that I have deducted it all, for I cannot estimate how many sheets out of each ream have been covered with elegant and imaginative drawings by my grandchildren.
Postage is another troublesome item for me. At one time I thought I could solve the problem by paying for all my postage stamps with checks — but it just didn’t work.
Sometimes I have manuscripts to mail or books to mail and I don’t know what postage to put on them, so I buy the stamps at the Post Office, paying cash.
The postal clerks are always obliging and give me a little slip of paper as a receipt, which I tuck in my back pocket. They then go through the washing machine and the drier and are rendered so pathetic that I could hardly produce them, if required, as evidence of this expense.
My wife, a western American, takes a large view of the whole thing.
“Oh, just estimate it,” she says.
But I wasn’t brought up that way.
I first started paying income tax in England and, however liberal and understanding Uncle Sam maybe, that liberality was not shared by the royal collector of taxes — at least in my day.
I remember one year that I owed a certain number of pounds and shillings and fourpence half-penny (pronounced ha’penny) in taxes.
Now it was not possible in those days to write a check (spelled cheque) for a fraction of a penny. So I sent in my check minus the half-penny. A little later I got a letter asking me for it.
The letter cost a penny and a half-penny to send.
I wrote back (another penny and a half-penny in postage) enclosing a half-penny stamp as payment. (You may not send coins through the mail.)
Sure enough, there came another letter in a beautiful blue envelope saying that His Majesty was not able to accept a stamp in lieu of cash and asking once more for the half-penny.
I wrote politely asking for suggestions as to how I was to make the payment. That cost another penny half-penny in postage.
Two weeks went by and another letter arrived saying that I should bring a copy of my tax return down to the nearest office of the Collector Internal Revenue, show it to them and pay them the half-penny.
It was a two-penny bus ride to the nearest office — but down I went. And after only an hour or so, I was able to give the tax collector the half-penny.
He then amazed me by giving me a receipt for it, which cost the government a two-penny stamp.
The whole thing sent me into a nervous decline for a month. Shortly afterwards I left England, never to return.
I explained all this to my wife but she said Uncle Sam is different.
“Just estimate the whole thing,” she repeated, and that’s what I’ve done. The paper is estimated to the nearest ream and the stamps are estimated up to, but not including, Christmas cards.
And Uncle Sam, I’m relying upon you, as I always do, to be different.
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