One of the things about working for IRS is that employees are strictly enjoined from talking about particulars of the returns they work with every day—which, really, is the only way to approach things, since we are seeing extremely private information about all sorts of people, information that shouldn’t be anyone’s business but the taxpayer and the few IRS employees who absolutely have to see each return in order to process it.
So this makes it difficult to say much about work. I think I can say, however, without releasing confidential information, that I have become convinced Murphy must be up to his elbows in tax return preparation. About every time I think I’ve seen all the possible ways to fuck up a tax return, I find a new one in the next batch.
The favorite way to screw up a return this year is the rate reduction credit, that $300-per-head check that most people got last fall. Either taxpayers try to take the credit twice over (i.e., you got your check last fall and then try to claim the credit again this year, which you aren’t allowed to do because that check was an advance against your 2001 tax refund, not extra given back out of your 2000 taxes), or they don’t realize they qualify for the credit and fail to claim it (which isn’t a catastrophe, because the computer is smart enough to award the credit anyway if you forget to ask for it). The short of it is, PAY ATTENTION when figuring Line 47 of Form 1040 or Line 30 of Form 1040A, because so far the odds seem to be about one in four that you’ll do it wrong and I’ll have to fix it.
Today was my first day out of the training class for Error Resolution (“ERS” for short), and I spent the whole day working 1040As—which, paradoxically, are harder to work than 1040s, and both of which are easier to work than 1040EZs (“E-Z” only for the taxpayer). I made pretty good time for a newbie, which is important; although I won’t be on production metrics for a week or two yet, I need to be working up speed as well as accuracy already, because productivity is one big factor considered when furlough time comes. The better your metrics are, the longer you’re likely to be kept on.
A dead relative made fun of the service station. Fnord.
