I’m too busy to go through so many tax documents, in so many boxes, in so many places – so I’m not filing my tax returns.

News with a Twist/Satire

As Around the Block channels Donald Trump, I assert, “I don’t intend to file until the IRS asks, Please, please, please.”

As I’ve done for the last few years, I didn’t file my 2022 taxes this April. Similar to previous years, I was simply too busy to collect all the information I needed to send to my accountant. So I filed for an extension, dutifully ensuring that I estimated my tax liability so that I wouldn’t be subject to penalties when I did file.

It’s now June, two months later. I’m still busy. But I’ve noticed, based on watching cable news, that the former, twice impeached, twice indicted, disgraced former president used “being busy…as you’ve sort of seen”… as one of his rationales for not returning the boxes and boxes of classified information he took from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago playground. Perhaps “being busy” might be a good enough reason to not file my taxes at all…or at least not for a long, long while.

But then I got serious. The IRS wouldn’t stand for the “being busy” excuse for not filing taxes. Even though the agency is a bona fide member of the “Deep State,” they couldn’t be that gullible. I racked my brain. I needed to come up with more reasons, more plausible reasons, for not filing. And then I realized, why rack my brain? Just like that former president knows that being busy isn’t quite enough, I like him, could come up with plenty of more plausible reasons. So, I started a list:

• I had stored some of my tax records in boxes in my guest bathroom shower. Unfortunately, we had guests staying with us who, not noticing the boxes (jet-lag), turned the shower on, soaking the documents. It will take weeks, maybe months for those documents to dry out and be readable;
• Some of my documents (and some of my papers that are not documents) were stored in the guest room closet. Wouldn’t you know it, those same house guests upset the carefully placed pyramid of boxes spilling the contents all over the floor. I don’t know how long it will take me to sort through the papers and put them back in order;
• I stored a good number of boxes in my own closet. Unfortunately, I had also used those boxes to store other things – my golf shirts, my pants, my shoes and other articles of clothing, clean and dirty – with my tax papers. I will need months to sort through and separate my personal clothing from my personal tax papers;
• Because I was running out of space in my house to store all my boxes, I requested and received permission from my community’s HOA to store many of my boxes on the stage of the community clubhouse. I stored them upstage right so they would be as far out of the way as possible. Despite taking that care, during a performance by one of our clubs, a chorus line of active adult dancers stumbled over the boxes. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt so I avoided a hearing in front of the HOA’s grievance committee. But more importantly, as in the guest closet, paperwork spilled out of the boxes which will require weeks and months of re-sorting and re-boxing.

Whew!

The filing deadline is mid-September. I can confidently predict that I will still be busy in September. I also know that the drying out, the re-boxing and re-sorting all these documents (as well as the papers that are not documents), and the separating of my clothes from my paperwork will not be finished by then. In any event, even when I finish, following that former president’s lead, I will not file until the IRS asks “Please, please, please.”

Note: The insight into my case for delaying the filing of my 2022 taxes comes partially from this: