Government Efficiency? Behold "Schrodinger's Tax Payment!"

So, I got a notice from the Internal Revenue Service today, telling me that I owed an amount pending from a prior notice that announced that we hadn't paid enough tax for the tax year 2022.

Fair enough. My estimated pre-payments had been too low.

I recognized the amount in this 2nd notice, and knew for sure that it was paid in late December of 2023, well before the January 1st 2024 deadline. As in several days before the 2024 deadline. Paid online, what's more... on the IRS web site...

So I went through all the paperwork, thankful that I am somewhat OCD-ish about keeping extensive records of every possible paper trail that could ever be asked for. Lo and behold, I found a copy of the IRS website payment receipt with a confirmation number dated December 27th.

So I proceeded to go through the general pain in the butt procedure of getting logged into the IRS website itself so I could access my tax records online... and after this and that and the other verification I was able to look at our tax account.

Indeed, there it was! A line item showing that a payment in the amount of $107.99 — which is what was owed — was in fact made on December 27th. And yet? Here I was with a notice dated January 10th saying that the previous request for payment had not been filled.

So I went through a number of loops and hoops in order to arrive at a complete listing of all activity on our tax account which interestingly enough showed that the payment (which, on another part of the website I could confirm having been made) had not been applied to the account.

After spending a good half hour scrolling through different pages trying to understand what the heck was going on I finally got to a page that had a little banner across the top of it that said words to the effect of "if you made a payment between December 20th and January 10th it may not be reflected in your balance. This is due to a scheduled system upgrade that will last until January 21st."

Schrödinger's Tax Payment?

So clearly, this is a case of "Schrodinger's tax payment" because the IRS both has and does not have our payment... at the same time!

But that's not really my reason for sitting down and putting these thoughts into words. The thing I'm thinking about is here's a fine case of "your tax dollars at work."

Whereas I realize that the Internal Revenue Service is an enormous organization, clearly one part of their online system does not recognize that another part of their online system is being upgraded, so now the expense and resources are being spent to send out paper notices for something that is not showing up because of their system upgrade and which actually has nothing to do with the taxpayer!

I'm guessing it is stuff like this — along with $700 toilet seats — that leads to so many people hating on the government!

For the time being, I think I will just wait until January 21st and see what happens. Hopefully, I'll be able to log back in and ascertain that the payment was, in fact, appropriately applied.

What will be really fun is if the payment updates but the system doesn't recognize the fact that the additional interest charged since December 27th actually isn't applicable but they will still send me a paper notice that says "thank you for your payment, but you still owe 17 cents!"

Sometimes it takes a lot of patience to navigate the world!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Sunday!

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Created at 2024-01-13 21:14 PST
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