Tax season! Will it never end?
Tax Season is over!!! Or so I thought. The latest news? The tax deadline has been extended to April 26! Well at least it is for the East Coast.
It all started with the storm of the year on Monday, the 16th. This was going to be a good ol' fashioned Nor'easter. On Sunday, April 15th the snow started flying right after we got out of church. Earlier than we thought. It continued thru the night and in the morning we woke up to much rain and gusty wind. Since we live inland it wasn't so bad and we decided to leave as planned for our 45 minute trip to work. thankfully we did not lose our power even tho we were prepared for it. Isn't that how it always happens?
About halfway there we started to notice two things, one, the wind was picking up as we were heading towards the coast and homes along the way seemed to be darkened. We saw no evidence of electricity as we drove thru the wind and rain. Great. About a mile before we got to the office we started to see signs of electiricity and knew our trip was not in vain.
Well the wind blew and the rain pounded all day. As it did so, the snow from the night before melted away. As I looked outside at the horizontal rain, I was amazed we never lost our power that day. We continued cranking out the last returns and those that dared to come told us stories of down power lines, flooded out roads and tree limbs scattered about. These brave people literally blew in and out of our office.
On Tuesday April 17 and supposedly the last day of tax season we found out upon waking that morning that tax season was extended two days. Zippity Do Dah. NOT. This does not make a CPA's office dance for joy, let me tell ya. We spend the weeks in countdown mode looking forward to and having only enough energy for that very last day.
We spent that last day as we always do.....doing extensions. It's quite a process to make sure we don't forget anybody. We get a few last minute calls from those just checking in making sure we don't forget them. We got one call from a lady who was supposed to pick up her return but her road was flooded out so bad she didn't dare brave it. Of course she heard the news of the extended two days and was hoping to come in today, Thursday the 19th. Well that's a problem I told her because we were taking Wednesday thru Friday off and had been looking forward to that for months. Another extension was filed. Her response? "God bless you people."
It's funny to see some people absolutely terrified of the IRS and others who don't bother filing returns for years. We have one guy we need to work on that hasn't filed a return in 11 years. He's gonna be in a bit of trouble and is darn lucky he hasn't been contacted yet. But he will.
So now, after all the extensions are filed we get the news that the deadline is extended to the 26th. It's not really going to affect us since we've covered all our bases. We start working on the extensions next week or at least those that have brought their stuff in already including the guy who hasn't filed his in 11 years.