My Least Fun Day – A Tax Audit at the IRS

There is no small talk during an IRS  tax audit. No chatting. No smiles. It’s been many years since my first (and only) tax audit but I well remember the deadening atmosphere of that IRS office. Up till then I had been in and out of the colorful offices of newspapers, publishing houses, advertising agencies and art departments. The contrast between those places of high energy and creativity and the drab, silent IRS office — so devoid of personality and personal effects — unnerved me.

I was there alone. The IRS letter said I could have someone represent or accompany me, presumably meaning my tax preparer, a man I thought best to keep out of the IRS spotlight.   He had been recommended to me by a magazine art director, how or why I can’t imagine. His office on 42nd Street was closet-size, a cluttered, dusty space he shared with another man sitting at a facing desk. A noisy breather, my tax preparer worked in pencil, the better to make numerous erasures as he filled in my first Schedule C tax form.  I had just gone freelance and he was explaining all the deductions the self-employed could claim, many of which I was hearing for the first time. So needless to say I had not saved any receipts for those deductions. No problem, he claimed. Just estimate your expenditures.  My memory for numbers is none too sparkling, so back and forth we went, me struggling to remember and him spurring me on to spin ever higher figures.

And these, apparently a bit too fanciful figures, had brought me to that IRS office.  Dressed in inexpensive, oldish duds and scruffy shoes (I decided to forgo a tattered shawl), I attempted to explain my failure to provide the IRS with the requested expense receipts. After listening deadpan to my tale, the agent did some fast figuring and came up with a number for my allowable deductions the IRS considered more realistic given my particular financial situation. Relieved — my imagination had conjured up far scarier punishment scenarios — I grabbed at it and paid up.

I was not the only client my tax preparer brought to the attention of the IRS. When another designer also went to him to prepare his first tax return as a freelancer (this time armed with all the correct expense receipts), he was shocked to hear the final tax amount he owed the government. So shocked, in fact, he ordered the tax preparer to instantly double all his deduction figures. Done!

This time when the IRS came calling, I heard they went directly to that designer’s apartment to personally check out all the lofty expenditures he had claimed for his home workspace.

So if audit visits to or from the IRS are not things you’re particularly keen on and would prefer to avoid, check out these Wall Street Journal suggestions. 

And if you’re curious to know how an IRS audit actually works, read all the details from the horse’s mouth.

 

More on Taxes and Business: 

Apr.02, 2012 | filed in Career, Financial, Taxes | Comments (4)

Why I Envy Men and How It Costs Me Money

Here’s the scenario: on my deck are huge, weighty wooden planters of flowers, the cause my landlord suspects, of flooding in the apartment below. He wants those monster planters off my deck and OUT of there. Swell. If I were a guy, I’d simply flex a muscle or two and haul those babies downstairs. But I’m not; I’m an average size female. Not weak, but nowhere near strong enough for getting the job done in this century. Lugging all that dirt in manageable amounts down four flights would take forever and as for the thick wooden planters themselves – forget it. Even when empty, I could barely budge the things.

So once more, the building superintendent gets another job making him richer and me poorer. In the past I’ve paid him paid to haul away god knows how many defunct air conditioners, TV’s and computer monitors (lifting my first 80’s monitor was like lifting a Volkswagen).

More than the money though, I hate that I’m simply not strong enough to schlep my belongings from here to there whenever I feel like it.  This inconvenience is plain annoying: the having to contact some Mr. Muscles, the scheduling, the hanging around waiting for Muscles to show.

Speaking to a friend living in the suburbs, I discovered she too abhorred not having the physical strength to hoist heavy stuff around her house, chores that her husband used to take care of before he became ill. Between currently caring for him and working full time, she’s got a mighty full plate, and little patience for things that slow her down, like having to summon help for chores demanding more strength than hers.

This disparity in physical strength plays out in smaller ways too. Currently in temperamental getting-stuck-mode, our brownstone basement door has been taped on the side to make it easier to open and get to the garbage cans. But even when I wrench out my shoulder tugging at that mother door I’ve had a number of No goes. Meaning leaving garbage bags sitting in the downstairs hall. Not elegant.

Another big positive for men and their superior strength — they can go where they want when they want and nobody will mess with them. Around midnight some winters ago when the snow was deep and still falling, a male friend suggested we take a walk in Central Park. Was he kidding? Central Park in the dead of the night? As a female I would no more consider that then hopping a rocket to Mars. A big fellow, he scoffed at my hesitation and concern. So up we booted and off we went. By then it had stopped snowing. The moon was bright and glittering on the Great Lawn.  Another couple appeared, their dog happily bouncing through the snowdrifts. All was white and silver and clean and silent. A beautiful night, one I would have missed if not for Male Muscles beside me.

And yes, these vexations could vanish with a man around the joint. But as I’ve already discovered, that can sometimes lead to the exchange of one set of hitches for another…

Where do you stand in this male/female physical strength equation?

 More on city living:

 

Mar.26, 2012 | filed in Economics, Living, Outside-the-Box | Comments (6)

Ah yes – Spring! Time for a Break!

My blog and I are taking a Spring Break. Bright with spring flowers, here is a bustling view of the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum. See you all soon with some new tidbits…

 

Further Spring/Blossom Notes:

Mar.12, 2012 | filed in Holiday, Living, Well-Being | Comments (2)

Thanking Job Interviewers by Hand or Email?

According to a post written by a young hiring manager at BI, sending handwritten Thank You Notes after job interviews felt “old” to her. “Ancient!” So not 2012!

In an earlier post she stated the biggest mistake job applicants made was not sending her a Thank You Note after she interviewed them for job openings. This omission led her to surmise candidates really didn’t want the job or were disorganized and weak in follow up. Additionally she said she would forget them quicker than those who thanked her.  Her comments ignited a barrage of hostile replies. Thank You Notes, some said, were strictly ass kissing, demeaning,  for suck-ups and emotionally needy managers.  She also came under fire for her “arrogance, petty expectations” and “moronic ego”" Why, asked another reader, didn’t she simply ask job applicants to “jump through flaming hoops” for her.

Readers from Australia and the UK also chimed in to say they had never heard of job applicants writing Thank You Notes during the hiring process.  Peculiar to the US, the custom is apparently not practiced in other countries.

In the young hiring manager’s post about handwritten Vs email Thank You Notes, comments poured in from both sides of the aisle and they weren’t all age-biased. While much of the younger set preferred to email Thank You Notes, some of them also applauded handwritten notes — hand delivered to boot.

A surprising number of responders saw Thank You Notes in a negative light — as meaningless, signs of desperation or as phony flattery designed to score an advantage. One cynical responder saw the whole hiring process as a pure power play. To send a Thank You Note to an Interviewer was a sign of weakness, a sure way to show who was in control and had the power.

I didn’t do an official count of those who preferred email to handwritten to no Thank You Notes at all, but the best expressed preferences seem to chose the pen over the keyboard. Why?  If you were among hundreds vying for the same job, standing out from the crowd was essential. Most applicants chose the easier route and emailed their Thank You Notes.  Handwritten ones on quality paper were rarer, reflecting a high level of professionalism and courtesy often lacking in today’s workforce.

Going that extra distance could also be an advantage in any tiebreaker situation. With so many highly qualified people in the current job market, what if two, or even three, applicants all come out equally well qualified for a position at the end of the interview process. A classy hand written note could be the tipping point in one’s favor.

As someone who’s sat on both sides of the hiring desk, I prefer looking at every situation separately and taking my cues from the person conducting the interview. Given their industry and personality, what’s their expectation? Are they old school? Creatives?  No nonsense engineer types?  High tech nerdies? If your interviewer is inscrutable, you could always do both. Hit them with an immediate email thank you, then follow up with a note handwritten in your own words (especially important) free of imitative boilerplate language.

More in the Career World:

 

 

 

Mar.05, 2012 | filed in Career, Outside-the-Box, Style | Comments (4)

Our Towns in the Days of Penny Postcards

NYC Fire Department engine racing to fire

 

Salt water baths San Rafael, CA

DC-6 Flying over Manhattan

Yesterday my cousin Mark sent me a link to Penny Postcards, a site he thought I’d find interesting. I did. Covering all U.S. states, it collects images of penny postcards showing our cities and towns in long gone days.

Taking a nostalgic trip along Memory Lane, I visited the Connecticut town where I was born, marveling at the wide open spaces and sparsely populated streets where there was always plenty of room to play or sled or bike without danger or restraint. And how quaint the views of old New York City looked with their enormous expanses of empty sky, now crowded cheek to cheek with skyscrapers of bricks and steel and glass.

America came late to postcards. In 1840 Great Britain introduced uniform penny postage and in 1869 Austria came out with the first postcard. After their popularity quickly spread across Europe, America finally got into the act in 1873.

Our little old one-cent postage lasted a surprisingly long time, all the way to January 1952 when the price increased to 2 cents. From then on the Post Office went to town increasing prices left and right till today we now pay $.32 to sent a postcard, a whopping increase of 1500%.

As newer, faster ways to communicate have come along, picture postcards have been fading from the  scene.  Still, they’re fun to look at, evocative reminders of our country when it glowed with a younger, more innocent light.

More Americana:

 

Feb.27, 2012 | filed in Living, Photo Journal, Style | Comments (4)

Foods Containing Beaver Anal Glands: Don’t Ask!

A while back I wrote about the presence of hair, beetles and beaver anal glands in the foods we eat. Of the three, beaver anal glands, a whiffy combo of glands and urine that beavers use to mark their territory, captured by far the biggest share of people’s attention. Since then numerous search queries have hit my blog seeking a list of specific foods containing these glands, which are ground up into a product known as castoreum used in raspberry, strawberry and, most often, in vanilla flavoring.

As it happens no up to date consumer list of specific foods containing castoreum exists anywhere. Why? Well to start out, would you buy a food product if you knew it contained beaver anal glands? These glands are not exactly anyone’s idea of a heavenly nosh. Anticipating this, the food industry managed to get castoreum added to foods under that innocuous, legal and sometimes not so innocent label: “natural flavoring”. So even if castoreum IS present in foods and beverages like ice cream, yogurt and soda, you and I will never know it. Nor will any food manufacture divulge this info if you contact them (why nix sales?). They will inform you that THEY never add castoreum to their foods and beverages. If pressed, they will probably add they can’t of course speak for their vendors, who supply them with flavorings containing ingredients that are proprietary information.

After Jamie Oliver, a British chef with a large following, appeared on the David Letterman Show last year and mentioned that vanilla ice cream was made with castoreum, the Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) contacted 5 manufactures of vanilla flavoring to ask if there was any truth to this statement. All five manufacturers said no, that castoreum is not used today in any form of vanilla for human use.

On the other hand, Fenaroli’s handbook of flavor ingredients (a $340 industry eBook) published in 2005, provides a list of reported foods and beverages containing castoreum extract:

Reported Uses PPM (parts per million) (Fema* 1994):

Food Category Usual Max
Alcoholic Beverages 79.59 93.69
Baked Goods 62.28 68.47
Gelatins, Puddings 43.58 47.34
Soft Candy 37.28 44.10
Frozen Dairy 24.39 26.26
Nonalcoholic Beverages 24.21 29.77
Hard Candy 24.17 24.17
Chewing Gum 18.60 42.09

 

So what are we to believe? Are beaver anal glands still being used to flavor foods and beverages or not? And If so, how much and which foods? How about it, Food Industry?

*Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association

More Food Hanky Panky:

 

Feb.20, 2012 | filed in Economics, Food-Stuff, Living | Comments (28)

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