how do you make $600/hr?

get a bad tax accountant.

so this year laura and i decided to have our taxes done by a "professional" due to the retardedly complicated nature of tax code and our situation this year. we dropped off all our paper work near the end of february. i called after three weeks to check on them and they hadn't even looked at them yet but got right on it after i called. we went in a day or two later to pick up the returns.

i was quite disappointed to find out we owed money because in my previous attempt to do them on taxcut i had thought i was getting ~$2k refunded. they told us we owed $974 in federal taxes, we were getting back $873 from maryland and owed $421 to the state of virgina - all in all we owed $522. a quick look over the return and a few questions later i realized they had not included quite a few things, for example one stock transaction which was a loss of about $450 had no purchase price and was therefore listed on my taxes as a short term capital gain. i told her about a few other issues and emailed her some more records later in the week.

i went back last night at 6pm, straight from work, hoping to find a completed tax return but alas, it was not to be. i stayed there until nearly 11pm pointing out mistake after mistake after mistake. and it was really weird stuff, like negative numbers listed as amounts for charitable donations. by the time all was said and done, we had gone from owing $522 to getting a net refund of $2403.

to top things off, after all that, we had to pay the accountant $540 to do our taxes. and the worst part, i'm still not convinced it's correct. since now somehow we now owe maryland money instead of getting a refund, and are getting refunds from virginia and the feds instead of owing.