Federal and many state income tax returns are due Monday, April 18. It’s time to book your zoom appointments with Rebecca Watkins, fCPA. Notices have been sent. Check your text messages.
The f stands for fake. Rebecca Watkins is my secret CPA pseudonym (fake nym), which I am now revealing to scads of readers of these stories. But I won’t tell you what the Watkins part is about, because it’s top-secret and also I don’t really remember, though it has something to do with Ems and an rCPA at Aitch N Arr Bloque. I think his name was Watkins. For real.
Sidebar: For the purposes of this story only I am suspending my tendency to spell out acronyms (ee-period gee-period eff-cee-pee-ay). If you’re looking for consistency from me, you don’t know me very well. End of sidebar.
Appointments are now available for existing clients of Rebecca Watkins, fCPA—me. My client list is short and exclusive, as they must meet stringent criteria:
I need to enjoy spending time with them on zoom.
Their tax returns must not involve anything other than:
Stuff I already know how to do; and
Stuff I don’t know but sounds interesting and doesn’t take long to look up.
They have incomes low enough that if I make a mistake, they are risking very, very few dollars.
Criterion one alone eliminates most of the human population. Criterion two-bee fulfills the AAFC requirement for continuous learning, allowing me to maintain my completely fake certification.
In the organization name AAFC, F stands for fake (of course. I'm nothing if not consistent) and C stands for CPA, making AAFC a delightfully nested acronym that I am introducing today, in this very story. Publication date February six, twenty twenty-two.
I like the way twenty twenty-two can be abbreviated twtwtw. I may start doing that everywhere.
Criterion three discloses that the risk of my making a mistake is nonzero. My belief is that whenever you encounter a criterion in a legal disclosure, it’s happened. In the oral contract that all of my clients orally sign, I orally disclose that the IRS has sent me several letters over the years, pointing out my mistakes and tactfully suggesting I pony up the difference. With interest.
So far the IRS has never sent me a letter stating that I’ve mistakenly overpaid my income tax, and they have attached a check for the difference, with interest.
I think the tax code is weird and ridiculous and, for the record, completely unfair. The social engineering aspect. The quite-obviously-deliberate introduction of loopholes for the inner circle of wealthy people. And I am morbidly drawn to understand it. Might be the Poe in me, that attraction to evil.
On the other hand, I truly admire the documentation on the IRS website. It’s clear and concise and contains examples. I am not joking about this; it’s really good. In another life I could write tax code explanations for the IRS. Now that would be fun to tell people about at cocktail parties!
> Hi! What do you do?
>> I write documentation for the Internal Revenue Service.
> Oh.
(Awkward pause.)
>> Do you like my hat?
> I do not like it. Good-by.
You have to admire the directness of communication of dogs.
Side bar: If you have no idea what just happened there, possibly because you grew up in a country other than the You Ess of Ay, it’s a reference to Go, Dog, Go!, a remarkable and influential piece of children’s literature written and illustrated by PD Eastman. Recommend! End of sidebar.
I wonder if any stories other than this one contain discussions of literature as wide-ranging as IRS communications and Go, Dog, Go!
There is a fourth criterion for RW, fCPA clients: The willingness to work on tax returns collaboratively and accept some preaching from the fCPA, me, along the way. I try to remember to preface my discourse with something like, Are you interested in understanding more about the unfair consequences of differences in taxation rates of ordinary income and capital gain?
I’m truly just fine with clients saying, No thank you, or even Aitch-ee-double-toothpicks, no! Let’s just get this thing done! I want to get back to pushing toothpicks under my fingernails, a less painful task!
I understand. Not everyone is like me. And that's a good thing, for heaven's sake.
There’s a short explanation of how I decided to became an fCPA: The first year I did taxes together with the father of Bee’s and my children, the man known as F (for father), well, F suggested or perhaps insisted that we use an actual CPA. I was newly married and trying to be open to other people’s points of view, at least for those early months. That year we’d not only gotten married but also sold my house, bought a house and sold his house. And raided our 401Ks and sold some MNC stock to pay for all of that shenanigans. So it’s entirely reasonable that F would think the tax return too complicated to do ourselves. Right?
F wanted to use the real CPA that he and Bee had used. (Stop and read, Bee Is Your What? or this summary: Bee was his only ex-wife at the time, the mother of Eddie and Gnat, and soon to become my lifelong friend.) The laborious selection process, free of relevant data (said I, not bothering to conceal my residual bitterness), that F and Bee had used to hire this rCPA was this: Bee and the rCPA’s wife had been in Lamaze classes together.
Now you recognize the why behind the choice of the adjective laborious. It’s okay and actually appropriate to roll your eyes right now, but then please return to the story.
I’m going to assign this rCPA a codename to protect his identity, for reasons that will become obvious well before the end of this story. Let’s call him Peter O’Sullivan, with apologies to any real Peter O'Sullivans out in the world or on Facebook. When POS took a look at our tax situation, he said that because we’d sold MNC stock (or maybe options or ESPPs; the distinction doesn’t matter to the gist of this story) to fund the new house, we had to pay a huge amount of money in estimated taxes. Immediately.
It was one week before the Ides of January, and estimated taxes were due the first business day after the Ides of January, which in nineteen ninety-eight was Wednesday, the Ides of January. We had one week to come up with seventy-seven bazillion dollars. I remember the amount exactly.
What POS failed to think about was that our income was considerably more than one hundred ten percent that of the previous year. Such a rookie mistake! We didn't have to pay estimated taxes at all! Paying our taxes by estimate, four months before they were really due cost us four months of interest on seventy-seven times ten to the bzth power. That's a heck of a lot of money to a person who spent her twenties in graduate school, scraping by on a pittance, buying way too much cabbage and bags of grapes that were marked down because they were separated from the stems.
I took the only reasonable course, namely firing the POS, buying Turbo Tax and delving into the tax code myself.
For nineteen ninety-nine. Nineteen ninety-eight damage already done. Sunk cost. Water under the bridge. The interest on seventy-seven bazillion gallons of it, which is enough Camelbaksfull to keep a thirsty graduate student alive for months.
Side bar: Turbo Tax back then was much more flexible and less dumbed down. I miss you, turn-of-the-century Turbo Tax!
Apparently this distrust of experts, those with real in front of their degrees, is coded into my dee-en-ay through my birth mother, an observation that I pledge to explain in another story, where I will also enumerate my other fake degrees: fMD and fJD.
Meanwhile, current clients please book your appointments by text with Rebecca Watkins, fCPA. New clients will be subjected to scrutiny.
[Photo of cover art from PD Eastman's classic, Go, Dog, Go!]
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