IRS Has Money it Wants to Give Each One of Us
Have you heard that the IRS has money it wants to give each one of us—at least those of us who use a phone? Since these days every man, woman and child has a phone, that really does mean everyone. It’s a refund of the federal excise tax we paid between 2003 and 2006 on long distance telephone service.
That’s the good news; the bad news is that they’ve made calculating the refund ridiculously convoluted.
The instructions for IRS Form 8913 include this gem:
“You will need your phone bills for the 41-month refund period.”
Well that stopped me right in my tracks. I’m a very organized person—reputedly, one of the most organized in the nation if friends and relatives are accurate character witnesses. But even I don’t save every phone bill. Recognizing that reconstructing one’s telephone calls for three years is near impossible, the IRS offers an alternative. Just take a standard $30 refund. So that’s what I will do along with everyone else. I won’t feel that I necessarily received restitution but I’ll have no choice because of the complexity of proving otherwise.
As a simplification expert, it is always injurious to my health for me to read the IRS instructions. Another gem in the same instruction booklet includes a description of how people who used prepaid telephone cards should get their refunds (thank goodness I’ve never used one). Here’s the actual example they provide to CLARIFY the process: “Example 2. S purchased the PTC from O. O is a transferee that purchased the card from R. R is a carrier. O is eligible to request a credit or refund. S cannot request a credit or refund because S did not purchase the PRC from the carrier.” I certainly hope that S, O and R graduated summa cum laude.
Aren’t we all complicit in a charade here? We spend millions of dollars to get professionals to help us pay money to the government and then more money to get the money back. Simplifying the tax code cannot come soon enough for me.