I went on line today to see what was happening to the US tax refund I thought should be in my bank account by now and wasn’t. According to the feedback in relation to my return on the IRS (the US tax revenue service) website, I’d made a mistake and instead of getting the tax refund of just under $500, I owned them more than $600. I tried to be calm, though that was somewhat difficult as my heart rate had shot up to over 100 bpm. I carefully went through the numbers covering the errors they said I’d made and could not find the problem, In fact, I thought my refund should have been $75 bigger, not $600 smaller.
At which point I told Peter I’d reached the conclusion that I had to stop trying to do so much, because somehow I just can’t get my brain cells to work as well as they used to. I told him I’d made some kind of mistake I couldn’t identify. (But not that the size of my mistake was well over a thousand dollars. I was saving that for a gin&tonic moment.)
Anyway, I got as clear a grasp of the issues as my anxiety could manage and phoned the IRS customer service line. After a ten minute wait, during which I was urged not to hang up because my call “was important to them,” an agent took my identifying information. At first she said there had been a problem with my social security number on my return. I asked her what she meant, because the number was complete on my copy. She fluffled around, so I suggested we move on to the errors they’d identified. “Oh,” she said, “that’s been changed. You were right on your original return and we’ve reinstated your original figures. It’s just not uploaded to our website yet.”
So she’s reauthorizing the refund. I’m hugely relieved, of course. But I’m beginning to think that if my brain cells aren’t working as well as they used to, they might be working better than the cells employed by the IRS. I strongly suspect that the “problem with my social security number on my return” was their mistake as well.
But our internet connection is still working. What more can one ask for? All and all, it’s turning out to be a good day.
