Stupid tax conversation.

[snarp]

Guy With Weapons-Grade Southern Accent: Kentucky Department of Revenue, what can I do for you?

Me: Hi, I have this kind of trivial tax question...

Guy: Well, that's fine, that's just fine.

Me: I'm doing my return, and it's asking me to list all of the out-of-state purchases I made on which I didn't pay 6% sales tax. But, I mean, I ordered a lot of books and stuff online last year -

Guy: Oh, honey, no, that's all right. Just give an estimate of how much it was, you don't want to list every single thing, honey.

Me: So it's okay if I just say, like, "various items bought online throughout the year?"

Guy: That's just fine, honey.

1) I actually think that there were several more honeys in there that I'm missing. I feel as if this conversation's total honey count was six or seven.

2) So even the Department of Revenue thinks that form is stupid - but I actually could have completed it. I possess all of the necessary information. I just called because TurboTax isn't set up so I can cut-and-paste from my spreadsheet, and I didn't want to retype it.

(Is there some sort of twelve-step program for spreadsheet addiction?)

3) I guess he probably found it touchingly naive that someone was bothering to report this. How could they possibly perform an audit?

Comments

[eagle]

California finally got wise about this, and this year you can now just pay a straight percentage of your income as the estimated use tax instead of enumerating all of your out-of-state purchases. It's massively faster, and for me ended up being less tax than I worked out with manually calculating the use tax.

Hopefully there will be more of that.