I have always hated doing my taxes and most likely always will. I keep receipts and records for everything. About 30 years ago I was audited by the IRS. It was the first year that I had substantial freelance work in addition to my salaried work through a studio.
The auditor was the sort of gimlet eyed fanatic that would have been at home on Grimm. I had made a lot of mistakes regarding some claimed expenses, and as I subsequently found out, the auditor had misled me about others. In any event, I got handed a whopping bill, with penalties, that would have put me in the street.
The evening after receiving my judgement from the IRS I met up with a friend, an architectural photographer, for dinner at a cheap downtown artists' hangout, Gorky's, to drown my sorrows in their home made beer and greasy food.
People sat at long communal tables. As I was working on my 3rd beer, we were joined by two young women who asked if they could sit with us. Hoping that I might get lucky I welcomed them to join us. We all started chatting and they asked us what we did, and naturally I asked them what they did for a living.
The two gals at first tried to avoid answering, saying that their line of work was arcane, but eventually spilled that they were both auditors who worked for the IRS. I nearly gagged on my beer, quickly set the mug down and made the sign of the cross at them.
It came up that I had just been audited and the two women started asking a bunch of questions and began laughing at some of my replies. I wasn't seeing anything funny at the moment, but they calmed me down and explained that they were going to help me, because the auditor who had done my audit was "dirty" and that I needed to fight the audit or I could expect to be audited repeatedly in future. They said that such auditors needed to be kicked out of the IRS.
They recommended several books to reference for record keeping and tax law for artists. They also gave me a game plan that would cause the "dirty" auditor to burn up hundreds of hours on my case, while the judgement continued to shrink.
Over the next several months I sent one request for revision after another to the "dirty" auditor and eventually got the judgement down to under $30.
I then walked into the IRS office where I had been audited and requested the "dirty" auditor's supervisor. I handed the original judgement and the latest revision over to the supervisor, asked him to look it over, and left. Two seeks later I received a notice from the IRS that I had passed my audit.
While I had made mistakes regarding deductions, most of those involved deductions that I was entitled to take and had missed, which the "dirty" auditor neglected to mention. Since them, I'm very meticulous in my record keeping. I'm also very thankful for the two IRS angels who helped me.
I hate doing taxes.
