Coming clean on the Ides of April

A Story for the Tax Season

By Marjorie Smith, 4-15-06

Okay, it’s the Ides of April (or thereabouts), time for honesty in all things, right? This is very difficult for me, but I think it’s only fair to tell you: this year I’m getting $200 from the State of Montana – and I didn’t pay them anything in taxes.

The difficult part for me is this – but this is also what I feel you should know, in the remote event that there is anyone else out there in NewWest land with an annual income as low as mine combined with an age as advanced as mine. The reason the State of Montana is paying me is that I am an elderly homeowner and I qualify for property tax relief.

I hope you can see why it’s difficult for me to come clean about this. In our youth-obsessed society in which the way we tell if someone has value is by their income, confessing that I am not only old enough to be legally defined by the State of Montana as elderly, but that I am also so poor I qualify for tax relief – well, it takes courage.

But I can do it. After all, I came out of the closet 11 years ago and started playing the accordion in public as a member of the Awesome Polka Babes. And that led me to admit that unlike my Montana-born parents, I was born (through a momentary slip in their geographical attention) in North Dakota. But I digress. It’s WHEN I was born, not where, that’s relevant. And the accordion is not relevant at all – accordions seldom are.

What it comes down to is that after years of being in denial (I stopped going to the movies rather than ask for the over-55 discount) I can bring myself to tell you this: I am over 62.

And why that matters at tax time is that the State of Montana has a tax relief plan for folks who are over 62 and living on a limited income.

Late last year, I called my accountant to check up on the veracity of the guy who told me about this law. (Yes, I live on a limited income, and yes, I have an accountant. I consider myself an intelligent person and did my own taxes for years. But one day I realized that it wasn’t paying the taxes that depressed me so terribly each spring – it was reading the excruciating prose one has to wade through to figure out what one needs to pay. As a writer, poor writing makes me very sad. As an editor, I am extremely frustrated when I can’t fix bad writing.)

So for about 15 years I’ve been paying a CPA to read the crappy writing and figure out how much I have to pay. He’s expensive, compared to those guys in the drive-through tax places, but he’s worth every penny.

So I called him and left a message. “A certain local politician just told me that no little old lady has ever been thrown out of her home for unpaid taxes, that there’s a special tax relief program for little old ladies living on small incomes, and he rather rudely implies I’m old enough to qualify. Is this true?”

I fully expected to find that the politician in question had just been embellishing a point during a public discussion we’d been having about whether rising property values are always good news (I had maintained they aren’t necessarily good news since if you have no interest in selling your home, all they lead to is higher property taxes.)

But I got a call from my accountant who said, “You’ve got to start acting your age! I had no idea you were over 62. We’ll file amended returns immediately.”

It turns out that for people – owners or renters – over 62 whose annual gross income is under $45,000, there is a property tax rebate (renters, it is assumed, are paying property taxes through what they pay their landlords). The rebates are made as refunds on state income taxes – even if you pay no state income taxes. All you have to do is file a return to get the bucks.

What followed in my case was the sort of bureaucratic low comedy that would make a great Broadway musical, full of songs and dances, with a plot that eventually reinforced my belief in the power of the fourth estate.

In December of 2005, right after I found out about the rebate, my accountant asked me to go the county courthouse and get copies of my real estate tax bills. (I had to go twice because I forgot about the quaint little system by which the taxes I paid in May 2003 would have been billed in November 2002, but the county people were very gracious both times and printed out the bills at no charge.) Then my accountant provided me with two Form 2Xes to amend my state tax returns for 2003 and 2004 and I mailed them off. They came back immediately with a note saying that the Department of Revenue no longer accepted Form 2X and that I must send in the entire tax forms for those years.

My accountant, a patient man (I guess you’d have to be patient to voluntarily subject yourself to a career involving regular contemplation of tax instructions) printed out revised copies of my state returns and I sent them in. In about a month I received a check – but it was just a little over half what my accountant had said I could expect.
I called the Department of Revenue’s help line and they checked into it. Yes, the check I’d received was my elderly homeowner tax rebate for 2004. What about 2003 I asked. We have no record of that, I was told. You’d better send it in again.

I called my accountant and with a barely audible sigh, he agreed to print out the 2003 returns again. He was, after all, responsible for my not claiming the rebate on the original returns and he would do whatever was necessary to correct his mistake at no charge to me.

I mailed the amended return in again and waited. And waited. And paid more interest on the credit card loan I’d taken out to buy my new laptop which I had hoped to get half paid off with the rebates. I waited some more.

Finally I called the Department of Revenue help line. I talked to a person who was clearly at the end of her personal bungee cord. I could expect to wait for my rebate for several more months, she told me. They were prohibited by statute from looking at any amended returns until they’d processed all the 2005 returns. And anyway it was my own fault for not doing my returns properly in the first place. I protested that they were the people who lost my 2003 return. I can’t remember which of us hung up on whom.

I went to the DOR website and sent them an email. It was there that I played my press card. After recounting the string of misadventures, I mentioned that I am a regular columnist for both the Bozeman Chronicle and for NewWest.Net and that I am always looking for column topics.

Cyber space must have sizzled as the response to that missive came back to my email inbox. I am now in possession of an abject apology from the Tax Man. I am going to frame it, I think, and take it out and re-read it every April just so I feel better about paying taxes (if and when my income actually rises above whatever number currently defines me as a disadvantaged elder.)

It turns out that my accountant filed the correct forms back in December. It was the DOR mailroom’s mistake to send those returns back (my returns and apparently a lot of others.) DOR Communications apologized for the inconvenience and said that in no way was it our fault that the accountant had used Form 2X. Not only that, but the DOR is providing additional training to their call center representatives, so that they’ll better understand how to deal with disgruntled folks like me.

The good news was that they had located my 2003 amended return and I should receive my refund check around April 17. Actually, I received it April 8 and it is already nestled in my bank account, helping to pay off my computer.

I hope that every taxpayer in Montana with a legitimate gripe is receiving similar speedy attention and that this didn’t happen just because I played my press card. (If anyone of my advanced age is out there reading this, I’d be curious about your experiences.)

DOR Communications informed me that the elderly homeowner/renter tax credit has been in existence since 1981. In tax year 2004, almost 25,000 taxpayers claimed it with total credits adding up to more than $12 million. Perhaps the only people to whom I can bring the joyous news about property tax relief are folks like me – people in deep denial who aren’t acting their age.

Go ahead, ‘fess up. Sometime honesty pays.

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