my eight hours of overtime for today is done. I have learned to hate e-filed returns with a passion; you can’t tell anything about them and what’s gone wrong with one when something does go wrong. And things do go wrong with e-filed returns, regardless of what the PR tells you. It goes wrong a lot less often, but the ones that we see tend to be the really, really intractable errors—like when someone has done something strange to his Alternative Minimum Tax, known to us as “alt-min” (line 43 of Form 1040, calculated on Form 6251). On a paper return, you can look at the 6251 and often figure out what the taxpayer has done wrong, or sometimes you find that he’s only done something unusual that the computer isn’t able to cope with, and the error simply needs an override. With e-files, though, trying to track down an alt-min error can turn into a ten to fifteen-minute odyssey that takes your productivity numbers outside, lines them up against the wall, and shoots them in the head. This is a Big Deal, since we’re on work metrics and are expected to process a certain number of returns per hour. The number of returns for production varies depending on type of return, whether it’s paper or e-file, and other criteria such as whether the return is current-year or prior-year. Prior-year returns are slower to work, because you have to look up lots of information in the manuals, since the computer isn’t programmed to know how to calculate returns before tax year 2000 any more.
This is all changing on Monday, though, because last Wednesday the manager of the Quality Review section came by and offered me an assignment in his section, beginning on Monday. I’d expressed an interest several weeks ago in going to QR, because that would be another skill code I could add to my profile, and more skill codes mean a longer season. He’d picked three other people instead at that time, so I forgot about it, figuring my length of service wasn’t sufficient to let me rate the assignment. (Almost all assignments at the agency are governed by your EOD—Entered-On-Duty—date.) However, it turned out that a couple of the people he’d first picked went back to their original units; I’ve no idea whether they couldn’t handle the work or just didn’t like it, but the short of it is they’re gone and he needed two more people—and I got tapped. And if it turns out I don’t like it, or once the need for me is less after peak (the few weeks right after April 15, when we’re all buried beneath a couple of million tax returns all coming in at once), I can go back to my original unit and work regular work, or even learn how to work rejects—the returns that fall out of the processing system for BIIG problems.
A silver pterodactyl operates some power drills exported to Poland. Fnord.
