A Big Oops

I try hard to live my life on the straight and narrow. Always have. I've avoided run-ins with authorities, only picked up a couple traffic tickets in over 40 years of driving, and never even considered cheating on my taxes.

So why am I getting an official letter from the Internal Revenue Service? That's what arrived in the mail last Friday. This looked serious too. For one, it was a fairly fat envelope. Oh, oh. And peeking through the window on the envelope, I could see "official business" written on one of the letters within.

I've always done my taxes myself. Filled out all the forms by hand, double-checked, triple checked, read and re-read the instructions. Wouldn't consider using H.R. Block or even one of those Turbo Tax programs you buy in the store. I've never had a problem as a do-it-yourselfer.

Until now.

Reading through the letter, I quickly focused on the crux of the matter. I owed another thousand dollars, they said. What?? How is this possible? They tacked on interest too and this didn't involve my 2010 tax return I had filled out earlier this year. It concerned my 2009 tax return done LAST year.

It took a few times reading through their technical explanation of my misdemeanor to glean what had occurred. Uh, incidentally that's misdemeanor in the generic sense, not the legal sense (I hope). I knew it wasn't like I'd forgotten to report the profits from my uranium mine in Tanganyika.

Ummm, for the record, I don't have a uranium mine in Tanganyika. I don't need to dig myself any deeper here.

In my zeal to sock away as much money as I could towards my retirement, I had over-contributed to my Individual Retirement Account, by several thousand dollars. I had misinterpreted "phased out" in the instructions as meaning something that was going to happen in the future. Nope. It meant that because I already had a retirement plan at work, the amount I could contribute to my IRA was being "phased out" because of my income.

Wonderful. In a sense, the government considers me and Wendy to be too wealthy (??!!) to qualify fully for an individual retirement account. That's hard to believe for someone like me who counts every penny and rides his bike around trying to spot spare change. As an aside, I found two dollar bills in separate rides this past weekend. About 993 more rides like that, and I'll be square with the IRS.

I called the IRS up and wasn't too sure that I received the full scoop of what I need to do next. I talked to a tax adviser who said you may get a different answer each time you call the IRS on something like this. So Wendy and I head to the bank that has our IRA tomorrow. Hopefully, they can steer me back unto the straight and narrow.

I'm not too confident about that though. We might have already gone too far down the path to the dark side. Remember the Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. Maybe some day it will be the Ballad of Dave and Wendy.