I thought my question was simple – “What do I do now?”
But I needed to go through 8 people and an evolution in my thinking to get an answer.
The answer was simple, but to answer my original question would have required an overall understanding of the process by one of the individuals I talked to. Instead the answer was only gained by breaking the simple-sounding question up into many smaller and more basic questions which the employees were trained to answer.
For the last decade I’ve filed my own taxes using Taxcut and every year it’s been pretty simple. Except this time I received an -INT form I wasn’t expecting, because I reported that income on my 2006 taxes. Silly me, I thought that because I cashed the bond in 2006 that it was income for 2006. Nope, the check from the bank said 2007.
So I called the IRS 1-800 number help line trying to figure out what to do. I told my story to the lady who answered, received a moment of silence, and was forwarded to the area that she best thought could help me. This happened repeatedly.
Each time my story got shorter, as I figured out the essence that the person on the other end needed to know.
Each time the person on the other end of the line responded to me I learned a new word or piece of terminology so that I could put my story into the language that the IRS used.
And then I reached one particular employee. She kept trying to make me understand that if I received an -INT form then I needed to pay the taxes. I’d figured that part out by then. But she completely didn’t understand what I was trying to ask. I finally had to stop her and say that she had done her job. I understood. Where should I go next?
This was when the concept crystallized about why my question hadn’t been simple. It required higher level thinking. Each of the IRS employees I talked to was trained in one specific area. The rest was irrelevant.
And then I reached my last worker. I started telling my story and how I thought I needed to file an amended return and he stopped me. He said – Let me ask you a series of questions and give me simple yes and no answers. He ran through a set of special circumstances and confirmed that none of them applied. Then he told me which form to fill out.
He understood that he knew one part of the tax code and had one specific job. Even better, he knew how to get me focused on the part that he could help with.
In the end, my answer was to pay the taxes in 2007 and file a 1040X for a refund of the overpayment in 2006. The question I should have been asking was how do I get back the money I paid in error? If I’d framed it that way in the first place I might even have been able to find the answer on the IRS website.
The whole conversation stood out for me because of the disconnect between my original thinking process and the method that I needed to follow to solve the problem. There was also a difference between what I thought were important details and what the IRS thought were important details. The amazing thing was that even with all the people I went through this entire phone call only lasted as long as it took me to fix dinner.
