I run a mostly paperless office, which has been really nice for me over the years. I keep very good records, folders with things saved in them, emails with their own categorized folders, etc, and I have disc backups and saved disc copies of everything in case a computer goes bad, etc. My online store that I just started back in December, has excellent reporting features, and PayPal simply rocks in the way it keeps up as my Merchant account. I don’t think casual PayPal users are aware of just what all PayPal offers to us business users — it’s amazing the services they provide, the reports, the ease of use for tax purposes, etc. Fortunately for me, I do almost all of my work/income/sales through PayPal, which is kinda cool for me when it comes time to do taxes too.

I even scan in receipts, contracts and other things I get in paper form and save them to the appropriate folders too, so that even the few things I get papered still, I convert to paperless.

I think this is great. My papers and files are easy to find; fully searchable by keyword and by content too, so I can pull things up by a few taps of a keyboard instead of shuffling through mounds of paper; it’s more secure than paper copies that can get lost, stolen, destroyed, or in the cause of the Amazing Brat boy, things spilled on it or used as scratch pad doodling paper; and it’s flat out better for the environment and takes up a whole let less storage space around the ‘office’, which just happens to be my home.

So paperless is just awesome…

But in this world, there is one agency out that that is ready to destroy forests for the sake of bureaucracy.

The IRS, my dear friends, is NOT paperless.

So when I received a letter in the mail, complete with a brochure in both English and Spanish, and information about my rights and appeals and all this other stuff, along with a two page one sided letter from the IRS, I wondered, “Huh, wonder what they want.”

Open the letter, and in bold and underlined, centered near the top of the page, it read: You are Being Audited

Well, I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t leave any room for confusion. They are, according to the letter, wanting to verify my earned income. To do this, they are requesting copies of all my: computer records, paid invoices/receipts, and my merchant account statement information.

For the entire year, this amounts to the following:

Cool, huh? That’s about a two inch thick stack of papers, that includes invoices and crap. This is JUST my invoices and such, for INCOME. It doesn’t include anything for my expenses (which I’m not sure I have to send, since they aren’t asking about deductions and I only took the standard deduction for the year in question, not itemized ones.)

There’s more to print. I’m stilling waiting on my daughter to send me the 1099s I got for that year too.

Isn’t this fun?

For me, I find the entire process fascinating. I’m not worried. When I ran my numbers again and then added up the hard copies on an adding machine tape (more paper), I was only 7 cents off on my digital copies that I ran (which is due to the rounding that the tax software does) and I was 44 cents off on the tape I ran of the hard copies. I don’t think 44 cents is going to break me either direction, so… I don’t cheat on my taxes, I didn’t take any itemized deductions, so once they verify the income, it should be an open and shut case and I’ll have fodder for writing about what to expect with an IRS audit, right?

Anyway, so much for running paperless, eh?

BTW, they don’t actually call it any audit anywhere but in the first letter. They call it an ‘Examination’, and they sent me a brochure about, “The Examination Process”.

What’s funny to me at this point though is my attitude about it. See, I never imagined I would be audited by the IRS. I mean, you hear the jokes about it, and you hear about it on TV or in movies or books or something, like it’s some urban legend to be feared or whatever. But I never really considered I might some day be audited, you know? That happens to other people. Gee, that happens to grown ups, and I’m not grown up, am I? That happens to rich people, and doesn’t the IRS know that I’m not rich? I’m a kept woman, dontcha know!

(shaking head) Crazy.

But we did run through two reams of paper, four printer cartridges, and a couple of paper cuts. I personally think that if people are audited and then it’s found they had properly reported their income, we should be able to bill the IRS for our time! (chuckle) I will say this… I had to put my business website address on the form I filled out, so I suppose it’s not a good idea to say anything overtly negative about the IRS right now, in case they come and read my blog! (giggles)

So anyway… I thought you guys might like to see a dead forest sitting on my table…

Time for me to get back to work, so I can make more income, so they can audit it for me too! I wonder if I can get them to audit my taxes before I submit them next time, and maybe get free tax prep, eh?

Then again, maybe not….

Love and stuff,
Michy

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