Last year, as most of you know, was a shitshow at the IRS. Years of underfunding by the Republicans, resulting in severe staffing shortages, now came to roost with an enormous backlog of unprocessed returns. This was not apparent last March I mailed in my paper return. Finally in August, unable to reach a human at the IRS and their "Where's My Refund" site not showing any information about my return, I decided to go old school: I contacted my congressman's office. My concern was since I wasn't bright enough to send it by trackable mail, I was worried that the return never made it. In the end, my return was found and within a couple of weeks, my refund was deposited in my account.
This year, I decided to bite the bullet and buy TurboTax (TT) and electronically send in the return. The wisdom of this choice was verified in February when the IRS issued an statement predicting a sequel to last year's shitshow. "Send it in electronically" they advised.
OK so far so good, everything was hunky-dory until...I sent in the return and...the IRS rejected it and things took me into a circular, kaftkaesque, bureaucratic black hole. The problem was that they were demanding C's AGI from 2021. Now, we filed joint married. The only AGI from that year was the summation of both our incomes so C would not have her own AGI on a married return!!!!! I tried putting in a number of things including "0" which would be correct. Nyet! Knowing that getting through to the IRS was impossible, I called TT and they proved nearly as bad. It took me 6 tries to get a human, with me screaming into the phone at the robot "AGENT, AGENT, I WANT A EFFING AGENT YOU EFFING PIECE OF CYBERSHIT" A calm female robot voice replied: "I'm sorry but I am afraid I need more details to direct you to the right agent." Finally, I got through. Talked to a lovely black woman named Marie. We went through the online correction process again. Same result. She agreed with my idea concerning C's AGI and asked if I could hold while she consulted with a colleague. She returned with bad news: the consensus was that there was some IRS system glitch. My only avenue:
SEND IN THE RETURN BY MAIL.
I politely thanked her and ended the call. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST-I just spent money and time to reduce errors on my part and to receive my refund in a timely manner. To no avail!!
Hopefully, since TT tends to autofill the returns based on info from previous year returns, I won't have this problem again.
Our modern life.
Thanks so much for taking charge of this.
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