Tax is a strange one. It is often one of the things we worry about the most but yet we don’t do all we can to figure out what the actual number is.
Having overseen the preparation of tens of thousands on tax returns over many year, and having personal prepared thousands one thing was always a puzzle to me. Why do people send their information in to their advisor last minute but then ask for confirmation of their tax bill as soon as possible?
Regular readers will know I lover Parkinson’s Law. It states that a job will take all of its allocated time. I am sure there is a lot of this at play but there must be more. Taxpayers really would like to know how much their tax bill is a soon as possible surely!?
Anecdotally about a third of all tax returns are prepared in January. January is the last of ten available months to prepare said return. Why the crunch then? Well I suspect that nobody likes “tax weekend”. This is the fictional weekend that I imagine most people have when something breaks in them and they accept they have to sit down and dig everything out.
Nobody looks forward to it. Nobody wants it to happen. It always takes far longer than it should because you have no idea where anything is and also you don’t really know what you are meant to be looking for anyway!
This is one of the benefits of having someone help I suppose. They will let you know what is needed and chase you along. It’s probably something that quarterly updates will help with as well. After all if you do something regularly you will become more proficient at it hopefully! Or get fined far more than you are used to. One or the other 😳