For the past three years I have been self-employed. If I am very, very lucky, this condition will end soon.
I should not be allowed to run a business unsupervised. I do not file things. Unless I’m under contract, I do not necessarily feel I must actually do work every single day. I cannot be trusted to receive a check and set aside a large chunk of it to pay estimated taxes.
It’s that last item that gets me into trouble every year. You’d think that my thorough awareness of the consequences might have some effect on my actions, but you’d be oh, so wrong. Tomorrow I take my painstakingly excavated invoices, receipts, W-2s, 1099s and statements to the accountant and wait to hear this year’s bad news. I always creep in like a penitent: “Help me, CPA, for I have sinned. It has been more than a year since my last quarterly estimated tax payment.”
The accountant patiently goes through all the envelopes of tax reporting forms that I’ve handed over without even having opened them first. There’s inputting and adding and questions. Then the yearly bombshell – always more than the previous year and always enough to make me gasp involuntarily. The accountant will say, “Yes, a lot of that is fines and interest for not paying your quarterly estimated taxes.” Every year I think, “This year it’ll all be different. I’ll never let this happen to me again.” Go ahead, it’s okay to laugh.
It’s not all me, either. For the same period of time, my husband worked for an out-of-state company that did not deduct taxes for our state. Thus, our state tax bill has often been even higher than our federal tax bill. Grrr.
So after we hear the final staggering numbers, we scramble around for the money to pay the gigantic tax bills. Somehow it always materializes in time and we think, “Whew! Dodged that bullet. It’s a good thing we’re going to be so much more responsible this year!”
I now realize that the only solution to this problem is my becoming someone else’s employee. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. In the meantime, I’m definitely going to talk to my accountant tomorrow about sending in my first quarter 2004 estimated taxes. Really. No really….
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