A little before the holidays we got a nice friendly letter from the IRS… they had examined my 2004 returns and decided I owed them about $1000 more. This turned out to be directly related to the fact that for 2004 my employer at the time decided to report a significant portion of my income on a 1099-MISC rather than various lines on the W-2 and then when the error was pointed out to them refused to correct the mistake because their 2004 books were “already closed” and it would cost them money to reopen them. At the time H&R Block looked at all the evidence I had showing why the income should have been on the W-2 and agreed with me, and determined that the best thing to do would be to file as if my employer had reported the income correctly even though they had not done so. We had the evidence to prove our case if it ever came to it.
Well, the IRS did indeed finally decide that they thought there was an issue. We made an appointment with the Block back in December, but their offices lost power due to the wind storm we had back then, and so we had to reschedule for now. At the time we made the first appointment we told them that the only papers we had redily available were the new letters from the IRS, since the rest of the documentation was in boxes in storage… actually, worse than that, when the movers packed our stuff in Florida, they took a lot of my paper archives (including the tax stuff related to this) out of labeled boxes, and dumped them into new… completely unlabeled… boxes. We have several hundred boxes in storage. Packed in tightly. Mostly now unlabeled, even those we had carefully labeled before the move. Somewhere in there is all the documentation surrounding the 1099 vs W2 issue from 2004. It can be gotten, but no time soon. The IRS wants their money by this Friday or they threaten top do nasty things. We told the H&R Block person all this when we made the first appointment. They told us to come in anyway and bring what we had, they should be able to get the rest of what they needed from their files.
But when we got there this morning, they had forgotten all of that. First they sat us down and tried to get us started on doing our 2006 taxes. No… that’s not it at all. Once they knew what was really going on they switched us from the trainee who had been assigned to us to the manager of the branch. She asked us for the papers which we had explained on the phone that we didn’t have. She said that they couldn’t really do anything without that… at least the return itself. We pointed out that they did the return, so they should have it on file. But guess what, they don’t have a national database. Our files are in Florida. They can’t get them in Washington. Then they went to try to look up the number of the office they used in Florida, so they could have that office FAX them a copy of our file… but their systems weren’t working, and they couldn’t get it up to even look up that branch’s phone number. I suggested they call their own national 800 number and ask or maybe call information, but they ignored those suggestions. At this point, they also pointed out that the office in Florida probably only kept the actual final form, not copies of the various documentation we brought them, not even the 1099 and W2 itself, let alone the supplimentary material we had brought in. Which they now thought was probably not enough after all. In the end, they basically said they could do nothing for us until we found the docs, despite having said the opposite when we set up the appointment. (Otherwise, we would not have bothered coming in.)
So, currently plan is: call the IRS tomorrow (they are closed today for President Ford’s funeral) to set up a payment plan to pay what they say we owe (about a grand). H&R says we should arrange to pay as slowly as the IRS will allow us (rather than just going ahead and paying it all at once) because of how the policies are structured on what money you can get back in what timeframes if you later appeal. Then, we need to find our documentation, then come back to H&R block and they will help us appeal these payments and eventually get the money back.
What a pain.
Brandy is very mad and upset, and full of talk of lawsuits against my former employer, who caused all these tax problems by refusing to correct the incorrect forms in the first place, not to mention all the other ways in which they screwed us financially and otherwise. Also of trying to get the IRS to fine them for not correcting the paperwork in the first place. She has some good arguments for why doing all that would be good… but I so much just want to be done with it all. I want to pay the money and then never think about it again. But she is probably right and when we KNOW they have cost us not just this thousand but thosands more (perhaps even tens of thousands) by other things they did… and most likely not just to us, but to other employees over the years… not to mention the costs to their customers, which must be immense… And somebody has to fight back sometime rather than just saying “thank god we escaped” and never thinking about it again like I’d kinda like to do. Dunno. Guess we’ll think about it.
But in the mean time, have to suck up and pay the IRS since it will likely be months if not years until the box with the papers we need to prove that we don’t really owe this 1000$ surfaces.
Bleh. Didn’t I hear something about the 16th Ammendment never being properly ratified making all income tax illegal? Oh yeah, too bad that is all BS. Would be nice if true. :-)
President Bush in his zeal to close the budget deficit has been just raking everybody over the coals in order to collect more taxes without increasing tax rates. I got a letter about 2004 as well in October, claiming over 4000 dollars in back taxes and such bullshit. Luckily, even though I moved, and I guess since I have had experience with the IRS boys before, that paperwork I never mix in with moves, and bring with me personally, period. With the paperwork I sent the IRS I was able to explain away the figures, and so the IRS will not be collecting anything, they just sent me an acknowledgment of that.
Now, for 1000 dollars, getting a lawyer to sue 2500 miles away, will cost far more than paying the 1000 dollars, just to star at least they will ask for a 2000 dollars retainer, and the results may not be to your liking. If you can get the paperwork at a later date you can file and ammeneded return and claim the money back. If not pay the ticket with a payment plan, and don’t look back.
Wasn’t it also around 2004 that H&R Block got “caught” screwing up their own tax returns?
and what would it take to open up a class action suit against your former employer? i’m sure you could find previous employees from that company to join in.
Yes. But they didn’t screw up customer returns.
In order to start a class action suit, the first thing you need is to find a lawyer that would be willing to take it. A lawyer would only take it up if the company had deep pockets, and there was a large enough class. Tough standards, that company was not that big…
If there was ever any lawsuit, it definitely wouldn’t be just for the tax stuff, but rather for the much larger figure including all the other things they committed to and did not deliver. And of course there would be a cost/benefit/risk analysis that would have to be done. I’ve already said where my initial inclination is on that. But if it was ever to be done, the main goal would not be recovery of cash, although I guess that would be nice, but rather to be enough of a pain in the ass to them to discourage similar behavior against other people in the future.
As for other people, I once asked on an email chain with a dozen or so other ex-employees, pretty much all of whom had been screwed in one way or another, if anybody had ever considered going that route. Nobody answered.
From things I partially overheard while I was there, I am pretty sure there was at least one suit with an ex-employee that they ended up settling. I am assuming however that in such a case part of the settlement was probably not talking about it, etc. Which of course may help that guy that got screwed by them, but does nothing to really keep them from doing the exact same thing again to the next guy or to warn anybody else to be careful.
One other option of course is setting up a company-xyz-sucks.com website where horror stories from ex-employees and (even better) customers could be posted… of course, that would open up all sorts of lawsuit possibilities against whoever set up that site and whoever commented on it… so I don’t think I’ll be doing that.
I am very careful never to actually mention the name of this particular ex-employer here on my blog (or any other employer for that matter) for that exact reason. I’ll speak in generalities, but I don’t want something negative I write ending up on the first page on Google when someone searches for them… regardless of how true what I might say might be… just too much potential trouble.
I already got pinged for something like that way back in 1995 or so when the number one search result for one of my ex-employers turned out to be pictures of burns I got in an on-the-job injury there. Oops. :-)
Hmmm… actually I notice there are currently 17 pages on my site that mention this ex-employer by name. I think I may want to robots.txt those pages or edit them to obscure the name or something.
For 1000 dollars it isn’t worth it. if you are talking about 20-30-40k, it may be worth looking at a lawyer.
BUT, AND THIS IS THE CAVEAT HERE. You need to find a decent cheap lawyer who would be willing to do some sabre rattling at low cost. if your recover can be 20k with a potential cost of 2k, I would look into it. Otherwise, it’s better not to drag the misery any longer and forget the whole damn thing and move on.
could you start a community-based page (i.e. myspace/previous-employer.com) that would be a place for horror stories? or would that be in the same category?
i found an old article about how to stay legal: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,38056-1.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1
Sam,
I must warn you against any history revisionism. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.
Catching up here…
What I am taking about is indeed in that dollar range, perhaps more depending on how agressive you get on things that are arguable to various degrees.
Of course, it also depends on Florida law. It may well be in some of these things that yes, they may have promised X, even in writing, but they are able to not deliver for reasons Y and Z with impunity. Who knows.
In terms of community sites that is kind of the same thing, although there are levels… being the one who hosts a site, being the one who “owns” it, being a contributer… anyway, unless I was prepared to defend myself in court if need be, I’m not wanting to go there. But you shoould feel free to Matt. :-)
And history revisionism… yes, I do want to avoid that. Generally when I have done such things in the past (most often for the whiners who complain about their names or emails showing up in my email contest) I have just modified the pages so that they look the same when being viewed by a human, but search engines don’t pick them up becuase I’ve replaced some letters with unicode characters which look identical but are not.
Doing the right thing to prevent or even discourage further damage for ANYONE is worth a loss.