When I was doing my federal taxes this year, there was a form for a new tax credit called Making Work Pay, which I qualified for. Most of it was straightforward, but one line asked whether I had received an economic recovery payment in 2009, so as to subtract that payment from the amount of the potential tax credit. Said payment might have taken the form of a social security benefit, among other things.
I went utterly blank. You see, every now and then, I get mailings from Social Security that confuse the everliving daylights out of me, and I know I got some random stimulus/recovery payment from the government at some point in 2008 or 2009 (unless that was an unusually vivid dream...), but I had no records of anything.
So I figured, what the hell, I'd just write in $250 (which was the maximum payment amount) on the assumption that the IRS was not going to argue if I ended up claiming a smaller refund than I might otherwise be entitled to.
Except they totally did.
On Saturday, I got a letter from the IRS informing me that there was an error on my 2009 tax return, which they had adjusted, and that an extra $250 has been added to my refund.
...
The government is acting like an honest clerk and correcting a mistake I made in their favor.
It is very sad that I find that surprising.
I went utterly blank. You see, every now and then, I get mailings from Social Security that confuse the everliving daylights out of me, and I know I got some random stimulus/recovery payment from the government at some point in 2008 or 2009 (unless that was an unusually vivid dream...), but I had no records of anything.
So I figured, what the hell, I'd just write in $250 (which was the maximum payment amount) on the assumption that the IRS was not going to argue if I ended up claiming a smaller refund than I might otherwise be entitled to.
Except they totally did.
On Saturday, I got a letter from the IRS informing me that there was an error on my 2009 tax return, which they had adjusted, and that an extra $250 has been added to my refund.
...
The government is acting like an honest clerk and correcting a mistake I made in their favor.
It is very sad that I find that surprising.