well i'm glad that's over

after spending 20 minutes in line at the post office this morning, it's over (knock on wood). getting the taxes done this year was possibly one of the worst experiences of my life.

since the last post on the topic, i called the md comptroller myself to find out what the correct forms were to file. turns out these guys filled out the wrong form for me. good thing i checked, because they obviously didn't bother and i would have sent in the wrong paperwork. after i told them that, i actually had to tell them what day the maryland taxes were due. they thought it was may 1st. eventually, they sent me a version of the correct form, of course it was filled out incorrectly.

i ended up taking the day off of work yesterday to do them myself. i sat down with a pencil and printed the forms and the instructions and did them by hand. i called the accounting office several times throughout the day and not once did they call me back. finally, when i finished doing them by hand, i drove over to the accountants office and laid into them. the owner was such a dickhole he wouldn't even turn around to acknowledge me when i walked in. he told me that they "have done 75 personal tax returns" and that i was "the only one who ever complained" and that he found it hard to believe that they were doing it wrong, implying that i must not know what i'm talking about. it was ugly, but i'm getting my money back (the owner claimed he was too busy to stop and write me a check at that time, but whatever). with any luck, my refund checks will be the last i will ever see of our 2008 taxes.

for the record, the accounting firm is Accounting Solutions Network, PLC and their url is http://arlingtoncpas.com. stay away. far far away.

final score:
md refund ~$500
va refund ~$1300
federal refund ~$1000
accountant fee refund $540

lousy accountant update

i still have no answer from the accountant regarding the proper forms to file in MD, however i did have a chance to look over the numbers on the return she filled out for us and we should be getting back at least $700 instead of owing $290. at this point, the service i am getting is bordering on criminal.

to recap:

taxes as done by account, we owe $522
taxes after corrected by dan, we get ~$3100

criminal. i will be calling the owners next week to get my money back.

random posts

* i have been trying to refinance our houses. rates are extraordinarily low, with 30 year fixed mortgages at about 4.875%. i've found that closing costs are generally more than i'd like to pay, and for some reason i have to pay local taxes when i refinance. i'm not entirely sure what i'm paying taxes on though. i'm having a hell of a time getting anyone to call me back. it appears that no one is interested in my business. one of the existing mortgages is with suntrust, so i thought i would just call them and see if i could renegotiate the interest rate without refinancing. i called them yesterday at 9:30am. i waited on hold for FOUR hours, at which point they stop playing soothing music and assuring you that your call is important to them. i left the office with the phone off the hook on speakerphone around 4:30pm, still on hold. when i came in this morning, i was still on hold. holding for 24 hours must be some kind of guiness record.

* yesterday i went mountain biking at wakefield park in annandale. for some reason, i didn't go all summer last season. i had forgotten how much fun it was and i'm glad i went. i almost ate it at one point crossing a narrow wooden bridge about 3ft above a gulley. i didn't have enough speed and rode off the side. luckily i was not clipped in and just tossed the bike away and landed on my feet. anyway, i also realized how fat and out of shape i am. at least mountain biking is fun enough that it doesn't feel like exercise.

* this morning i was listening to NPR and they ran a sound byte from an upcoming story. they were talking to a banker about how when the FDIC takes over a bank, it ends up costing other banks money. the guy they were interviewing made the comment that his bank was "paying for the sins of others". that made me laugh. welcome to the club blowhole.

"We were very angry that we were paying for the sins of others," Marranca says. "Obviously, the cost of this was because other people were doing silly, imprudent, criminal things. We never got involved in subprime loans. We would never do a loan with no documentation. We didn't cause this problem. Imagine if you had to pay for your neighbor, or your competitor screwed up somehow, and you had to pay for it." Yes, taxpayers, close your eyes and try to picture a scenario where you pay for the mistakes of others.

* on a related note, NPR ran another story on FDIC takeovers a week or two ago that was actually quite interesting. it sounds like the FDIC might be one of very few government agencies that is capable of acting swiftly and effectively.

* my accountant cannot tell me for sure which forms i need to file for MD. i was reading over the instructions because i wanted to double check everything again and it appears as though i might have to file both a resident and non-resident forms. i sent her a copy of the pdf instructions from the maryland website and she doesn't know the answer either. we're kinda running out of time here. also, according to our accountant, it appears that we have to pay taxes on laura's income in MD, despite the fact that she did not live in, nor make any money in MD in 2008. i find this hard to believe.

* last.fm is insisting that i will like the goo goo dolls, the bodeans and hootie and the blowfish. augh.

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.

there ought to be a law...

...against making laws so complicated that no one could possibly understand them. i was downloading a few of the forms i need from the irs website. i just googled the specific form i needed and up came a direct link to the pdf. i decided to take the file name off the link to browse the directory and this is what i found. is this some sort of make-work program for accountants? part of the economic recovery plan from the previous depression?

random posts

a large flock of crows has decided to take up residence in the trees just outside our house for the last couple days. there are hundreds of them and they're pretty damn creepy, especially at night. they also appear to have singled out my car for some reason and it has paid for it dearly.

tax code is retardedly complicated. i started doing our taxes this week. this year, i have converted a personal residence to an investment property which had expenses but made no money in 2008, gotten married and moved to virginia, laura sold some stock, exercised some stock options and made some contributions to a retirement account that she was not eligible for. i had some stock that was transferred from one brokerage account to another brokerage and then sold. that means one married-filing-jointly federal return, one married-filing-separately partial year state return for maryland, one married-filing-separately partial year state return for virginia and one married-filing-separately virginia state return. flat tax anyone?

we watched sweeny todd last night. laura and i agree that it would have been awesome if the italian barber had been played by dave arabian.

i've been listing to all my cds on my computer at work in alphabetical order by album name. this morning i hit the "greatest hits" block of albums. there look to be about 13 of them.

eff fees

nothing drives me nuts like extra fees (actually lots of things drive me nuts, but the topic of my blog today and this book is fees). baggage fees, local number portability fees, fuel surcharges, etc., etc. basically all these fees are normal costs of doing business which companies like to pretend are add-ons or some extraordinary cost that they should not have to pay for. why don't they just add this into the price of the service you are paying for? because this way they can advertise a lower price and then make it up by tacking on fees.

today, outraged by the fact that i had to pay a fee to pay my stupid living in arlington fee (personal property tax) by credit card, i sent an email to mastercard and called the arlington comissioner of revenue to let them know they were in violation of their merchant agreement. if you didn't know, it's against the mastercard (and i presume visa) merchant agreements for a merchant who accepts credit cards to charge a fee to the customer for using them. this is essentially why you don't see gas stations (or shouldn't) that have different credit and cash prices anymore. it says so right here in paragraph 5.9.2. it states:

5.9.2 Charges to Cardholders A Merchant must not directly or indirectly require any Cardholder to pay a surcharge or any part of any Merchant discount or any contemporaneous finance charge in connection with a Transaction. A Merchant may provide a discount to its customers for cash payments. A Merchant is permitted to charge a fee (such as a bona fide commission, postage, expedited service or convenience fees, and the like) if the fee is imposed on all like transactions regardless of the form of payment used, or as the Corporation has expressly permitted in writing. For purposes of this Rule: A surcharge is any fee charged in connection with a Transaction that is not charged if another payment method is used. The Merchant discount fee is any fee a Merchant pays to an Acquirer so that the Acquirer will acquire the Transactions of the Merchant

there are a few possible outcomes to the ball i have set rolling:

1. nothing
2. the extra fees are removed
   
3. the extra fees are removed and everyone's property tax bill in arlington goes up by $3 next year to cover the costs of removing the fees (sorry guys)

also, for the record, the $10 minimum charge at your favorite chinese carryout place is also a violation of their merchant agreement. though i'm not so upset about these because they are typically mom and pop type places and i don't mind and i pretty much always get at least $10 worth of food anyway.

5.9.3 Minimum/Maximum Transaction Amount Prohibited A Merchant must not require, or indicate that it requires, a minimum or maximum Transaction amount to accept a valid and properly presented Card.

i don't live here

previously, i told you why you should care about runaway government spending. today i am going to explain to you why poorly written laws suck.

i live in maryland. i own a house in maryland. i pay taxes in maryland. my paycheck gets sent to maryland. i am registered to vote in maryland. all my utility bills go to maryland. i pay maryland property tax. yet for some reason, arlington county virginia wants me to register my car there and pay virginia state property tax on it. why? because i like to visit my fiance who lives in arlington and i occassionally stay overnight. i received a letter (addressed to me at my house in maryland no less) stating that according to 14.2-69 of the arlington county code, all vehicle parked or garaged in arlington county register within 60 days. to be more precise,

14.2-69 Persons required to apply for and procure motor vehicle license; exceptions to application of article. (a) Every person owning a motor vehicle, trailer, or semi-trailer, with situs in Arlington County as defined by the Code of Virginia, Section 46.2-754, as ammended, shall make the application for and procure a county motor vehicle license tag within thirty (30) days of acquiring situs within the county or within thiry (30) days of purchasing a vehicle with situs in the county.

at this point, if you bothered reading that, you are probably wondering what the hell "situs" means. well according to the code of virginia, section 46.2-754, it means:

The situs for the imposition of the license requirement under the ordinance shall be the locality in which the vehicle is normally garaged, stored, or parked. If it cannot be determined where it is normally garaged, stored, or parked, the situs shall be the domicile of its owner.

the fee for registering in virginia is only $24, which is not that bad, and to be honest, i would probably pay it just to avoid the hassle. the catch is, when you register to get the county decal, you are suddenly subject to the virginia state property tax, which is assessed yearly based on the value of your car, which for me could be a couple hundred dollars a year. now aside from it being somewhat dubious of virginia to try and collect state property tax on a non-resident, the definition of situs is based entirely on the word "normally".

who decides what "normally" means? more than 50% of the time? more than 75% of the time? does my situation qualify as normally? my car spends at least 9 hours a day on the way to, or parked at work in DC. it spends probably a good week out of any given month parked at the airport in baltimore. and it spends probably one or two days a week plus just about every weekend at my house in laurel. what if normally means more than 50% of the time, do i only have to pay 50% of the property tax? you bet your ass it doesn't. what if i lived in another state in which i was already paying property tax on my car? do i have to pay it twice?

i suspect in the end, i'll just pay up because it'll cost a hell of a lot more to fight it than it will to just pay it (you might notice this is the same tactic used by the RIAA to sue 12 year old girls), unless someone knows a lawyer that has a bunch of spare time, loves to work pro bono and enjoys sticking it to the man?