Taxing Times

I worked for a tax preparation firm for six years preparing personal income tax returns. As we often pointed out to ourselves, preparing a tax return is the most complicated job the average person faces every year; for me, it was easy. Plug a few facts and numbers into a software program, et voilà, one return ready for filing.

Of course I cannot reveal anything about any individuals’ return—not even the fact that we prepared their tax return—but I can talk in general terms without giving away identifiable information.

When I think back on my years as a tax preparer there are certain events that stand out in my memory. One such event occurred during my first season. It was April 30ieth, the final date for filing personal returns, and as expected, the waiting room was crammed with folks who had waited until the very last minute. All you can do in that situation is put your head down and take the clients one at a time, acting as though you had all the time in the world to deal with the person sitting on the other side of the desk.

Late in the evening, as the crowd was starting to thin, I noticed a very thin young man, shabbily dressed, with dried blood on his upper lip, head into the cubicle of a colleague—an older woman who generally did not have much empathy with the many welfare recipients we dealt with. A few moments later I saw the young man leaving the cubicle looking downcast. Definitely not enough time to have prepared his return.

After the madness of April 30ieth, May 1^st is generally a very quiet day. All the regular tax preparers left at the end of the last shift, not to return until late fall, early winter. I was fortunate enough to be one of the very few kept on staff during the off season. So, later in the afternoon the young man I had seen the night before came into the office. I invited him into my cubicle. The blood on his upper lip was gone. After we settled into our chairs he said in a quiet voice, “Help me straighten out my life.” It turned out that he had not filed a return in five years, having spent most of that time addicted to an illegal drug. However, he had just come out of rehabilitation and was determined to get back on track.

The ideal way to work through that kind of situation is to prepare the oldest tax return first, then ask the client to pay for it after he receives the refund for that year. Then we’d go onto the second eldest and work our way forwards. It took a long time, but it was the best way to help someone with no or very little income to catch up. It was win-win: he’d get his taxes caught up without a financial blow and we’d be paid for preparing five years worth of returns.  It was one of those procedures management disapproved of, as they wanted the returns to be paid for before we filed them, but, when you are on the front lines you have to adjust to the real circumstances you face every day. The company would not go bankrupt if someone neglected to pay for one tax return after we had filed it.

As I worked with the young man that summer, I was impressed by his progress. Every time I saw him he was a bit cleaner and a bit healthier looking. I was quite proud of myself for having taking the time and steps to help him out—and was annoyed with and felt superior to—the tax preparer who had turned him away on April 30ieth. But now, from the perspective of someone older and—hopefully—less judgmental I have come to realize why she had turned him away that night.  First there was no rush to get his returns prepared—they were already very late. Secondly, if she had prepared five years worth of returns that night he would have been unable to pay for them. And, thirdly, it would take a long time to prepare those five returns and we had a lot of people waiting who did have to meet the filing deadline.

So, in summary, I had judged someone for judging someone else, when, in fact, she hadn’t. She was being practical and I was being the smug idealist. And, when I think of it, if it had been my cubicle he was in on the evening of April 30ieth, would I have gone ahead and prepared his delinquent returns right then? I don’t know; it was my first year and I was fairly naïve. I know that I would have acted the same way as my colleague had if I had been in that situation a few years later once I had had some experience.