On the Run

Shhh. Don’t tell anyone I’m here. I’m hiding out from the IRS. About a year ago I joined a group called Big Dave’s Tea Parties for Manly Men and now the IRS has targeted us. Doesn’t make sense though, we only have $8.19 in our checking account. The last fund raiser was a disaster. I told Dave if you’re going to sell chicken on the side of the road it has to be cooked. He was just tossing roasters at passing cars hoping someone would stop.

The whole point of the group was for men who like to watch football but also like to drink Earl Grey tea. Now that the IRS is leaning on any group with “tea party” in their name, we’re being audited. We haven’t exactly kept “books” of our financial activity either. Dirty Sam is the club treasurer and he has already admitted to embezzling $22 and all the Twizzlers. On top of that he only kept track of about half of our expenditures and those he wrote down inside his shoe on his Dr. Scholl’s odor-eating footpad.

We were visited the other day by Special Agent William Allamericanboy. I’ve never seen a haircut so precise. He grilled us for 3 hours with questions about our activities. The first strike against us came when we offered him a cup of tea. We only drink Earl Grey but the agent was a chamomile man.

We’re on the run now. Agent Allamericanboy is leading a search party from inside a hermetically sealed Chevy Tahoe so he doesn’t sweat. They’ve already caught Dirty Sam. He was trying to get to his brother’s place in the Jersey swamps but couldn’t read the directions he had written down on his toenails. Bear Bob and Earl the Republican hopped a freight train. They made it as far as the Maryland line before being found in a box car filled with mannequins. Earl gave up quietly but Bear Bob insisted he was legally married to “Barb”, one of the mannequins, and they were on their honeymoon.

I’m not going to say where I’m at because there’s a bounty on my head. I want to trust you but I know the lure of generic grocery store coupons is too strong.

Waiting for My Audit

I did my federal taxes over the weekend using a free tax prep website, but I don’t think I chose wisely. I could have gone with H&R Block or TurboTax. Instead I somehow ended up on www.taxesnyet.com. It started with a six page screed against paying taxes at all, written entirely in a Ukrainian dialect of Russian. I decided the prudent thing to do was pay even though the diatribe made a valid point about communist apparatchiks stealing from the proletariat thus negating any loyalty the hoi polloi should feel for the trenchant power-mongers of Mother Russia.

I loaded the forms and started answering the questions. I had my W-2 ready but the program instead asked me if I had received a “TS-2x work order for services rendered”. Very unsure of myself I went ahead and filled in the boxes with my information although I ended up with 37 rectangles containing binary code, a parallelogram that asked for my shoe size and an attachment with a recipe for spicy chicken salad.

Clicking through the screens on income I was asked if I had made at least 27% of my money through giraffe farming. Luckily I had sold Uncle McTavish’s Wild African Animal Preserve and Tire Repair Center last year so I didn’t have to pay that pesky Keep the Veldt Green import tax. Another screen wanted to know if I had been working on the railroad all the live-long day and if so, did I want to take the engineers’ coveralls-and-hat clothing deduction.

There were many odd questions. How many dependents did I have that would be considered “expendable”? Did I receive over $123 in tips from grave robbing? Had I taken out a loan from a man named Sal who lived in a Lincoln town car parked behind Cavatelli’s dry-cleaners in South Jersey? Do you own more than 3 pair of socks? And the strangest one of all: how much wood did your woodchuck chuck and did you sell it at a profit or a loss? What a ridiculous question. Everyone knows the chucked wood market has been stagnant for a decade; of course I took a loss.

I’m dubious about filing these tax forms but I spent seven and half hours filling them out so I guess I’ll mail all 231 pages off to Washington along with the coupon for a lower tax bracket if I pay quarterly next year on my eBay business selling Don Knotts memorabilia. What the hell, at least I’m getting a refund of 37,000 rubles and a goat.