It’s been an interesting tax week for me.
Until Sunday I had no idea there was anything to do with taxes still going on with me. I had mailed my Federal and State returns on the day before Pintastic NE 2024 (April 10th) to make sure they were taken care of before I left. On Saturday I went to the bank and found that the check I owed the feds (thanks Joe Biden) had been cashed but the state refund had not come yet. I found that slightly odd but it was only a couple of weeks so I didn’t think anything of it.
After work on Sunday my son ask me if I could scan a document for him that he had to email out as his own scanner was toast. I agreed went to scan the document and to my horror found my Massachusetts scheduled C1 sitting in the copier/scanner from the day of me copying everything before mailing.
Now years ago you used to be able to put a federal Schedule C on your mass taxes with a note saying “no mass differences” with your state taxes. The new form is different and unlike the federal form which has the “cost of goods sold” part on the back of schedule C that bit of notes is on a separate form C1.
So when I doubled check my taxes and saw “Schedule C” in my mass pile it didn’t hit me that C1 wasn’t there.
Because I pay sales taxes on the 2 to 3 copies of my book that I sell each year I have an account on Mass Tax Connect so that night I scanned the form C1 and attached it in a message explaining how the form was forgotten and asking if that was enough or if they wanted me to resend the lot.
I got an email noting a reply on the account and signed on. The message I got was a nasty surprise.
They apparently didn’t notice the missing C1 form because apparently despite me mailing my taxes at the desk at the post office they never received my tax return.
This was a real surprise as my federal taxes were sent at the same time and they wasted no time cashing my check.
So now I’m torn between the idea of taking part or all of tomorrow off to try to get all of this taken care of or waiting till my next day off and doing it Thursday but either way consider this:
At the time I found that form in my scanner I was kicking myself thinking this was the reason my refund wasn’t in and considered it a big misfortune. It turns out however that if I had not forgotten that form C1 I would have absolutely no idea that the Post Office lost my tax return (I presume it’s lost as it wasn’t returned via the return address).
Furthermore if my son had note decided to go to do a weekend visit at the National Our Lady of La Salette and his scanner wasn’t down who knows how many days it would have been before I realized that form hadn’t been sent.
Now thanks to both of these things the problem will be solved before the end of April instead of being discovered months from now and becoming a bigger headache then it already will be.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Update: Got the day off to contact DOR and talked to Courtney. She tells me to wait six weeks or so as paper returns aren’t always processed right away so that would explain the lack of a record. Just to play it safe I scanned everything and sent it via the online site but I’ll breathe a sigh of relief
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