At approximately 10:04 tonight (April 14, two hours prior to April 15), I looked over at Andy and said, “We forgot to do our taxes.”
“Well shit,” he replied.
We’ve had our federal, state and school district returns done for ages and have already gotten our refunds and everything (yay for too much withholding!), but we’ve failed to complete the return for our city taxes.
Again.
We decided that we still had a good 26 hours to get it postmarked, so we’d just deal with it tomorrow… but it got me thinking about my long and sordid history with local taxes.
We currently live in the town in which I grew up. In order to protect the innocent (or guilty, as the case may be), we’ll call that lovely little town Germanville.
Years ago, on one unsuspecting summer night, the Germanville police pulled into our driveway. We all happened to be outside, and my dad went over to see what was up.
“Is this the home of Emily and Anna Burns?” the officer asked my dad, who replied in the affirmative.
“I have a warrant for their arrest,” Barney Fife told him.
My dad, always able to remain unnervingly calm in such situations, said “Oh really. What’s the charge?”
“They haven’t paid their taxes to the city of Germanville,” the officer said.
“Well, there they are,” my dad said, pointing to the eight- and ten-year-old versions of me and my sister as we rode our bikes around the cul-de-sac. “Take them in.”
The officer quickly realized that there was a mistake and fortunately he didn’t cuff us and throw us in the slammer.
But it turns out, he wasn’t wrong, per say, just a little too early.
About 13-ish years later, my husband and I were residing in Germanville but decided we had had enough of big-city life… it seemed we were always stuck in a line of at least three cars at one of the two stoplights in town, and longed for a place with no stoplights at all. So we packed up and moved down the road to Farmerstown.
Despite the fact that we had purchased a home, paid utilities, and were regulars at the town bar bakery, we apparently failed to alert the proper authorities of our residency, because they never sent us any local tax forms. For the entire four years we lived there.
So, we figured that maybe they just didn’t have local taxes in Farmerstown, and we didn’t pay them.
(Now would be the appropriate time for that arrest warrant).
Until about a year and a half after we moved back to Germanville. Then, and only then, Farmerstown sent us income tax forms.
“We didn’t even live there in 2007,” I said to the nice village administrator (who sat in front of us in church every week), “How can we owe taxes?”
“Hmm… you have a point,” she said as she looked over her records. “But you did live here in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006.”
Crap.
So last summer, long after the April 15 deadline (and long, long after April 15 of all those previous years), we had to suck it up and pay all the back taxes we owed. And you can bet I booked it down to the city building in Germanville to file our 2007 return with them, too.
So really, you’d think we’d have learned our lesson. Judging by our revelation tonight, we clearly have not.
But it’s cool, we still have 23 hours before the deadline. We’ll make it this time, I’m certain of it. I would really hate for Kate and Sam to have to bail us out of jail.
