An Extra 48 Hours : Procrastinators Scurry as Tax Deadline Arrives
With April 15 having fallen on a Saturday, John Cole, along with the rest of America, had 48 extra hours--that’s 2,880 extra minutes--to postpone the inevitable.
And Cole, seated calmly in a bustling mid-Wilshire office of H&R; Block, was savoring every last second of the respite.
“I’m not going to file early so that Uncle Sam will get interest on my money,” the 48-year-old hospital security officer said late Monday morning. “I don’t give Uncle a dime’s worth of interest. He gets enough of my money and does little enough for me, so why bother throwing money down a rat hole?”
Quirk of Calendar
All across Los Angeles on Monday, tax preparation businesses were packed with procrastinators making full use of the two-day reprieve afforded them by a quirk of the calendar. For the first time since 1978, the traditional filing date fell on a Saturday, requiring the Internal Revenue Service to extend the deadline 48 hours to midnight Monday.
One of the few storefronts with nary a customer was a combined music and tax preparation shop on Vermont Avenue that opened earlier this year. Owner Natalia Bernal explained that business was slow because most neighborhood residents were taking their W-2 forms across the street--to a combined tax and travel firm.
For the U.S. Postal Service, which was to have 20 offices in greater Los Angeles open until the midnight deadline Monday night, “it might as well have been the 15th,” said spokesman David Mazer.
“What can I say? It’s like a party. People come every year at the last minute. They say they wouldn’t miss it.”
On Tax Day, Los Angeles postal workers sort approximately 500,000 extra pieces of mail, about 20% more than usual, according to Mazer. Workers also are assigned to stand at curbside and collect returns from passing automobiles.
State Returns
At the IRS main regional center in Fresno, roughly one-third of the 12-million individual returns filed last year arrived during the last week, officials said.
And upward of 3 million people wait until the last day to file their state tax returns, according to Jim Reber of the state Franchise Tax Board.
Reber said that the extra breathing room this year would make not a whit of difference. “Are you kidding?” he asked. “It just means they procrastinate a little longer.”
Tax experts said that a large percentage of last-minute filers owe money to the government or are involved in complicated business ventures. But there are also those who are simply overwhelmed.
“People who think they can’t do something, avoid it,” said Jerald Jellison, a USC professor who studies procrastination. “. . . This is a world of procrastinators . . . (and) the main people who procrastinate are people who don’t think they can do the job. Frequently we overestimate how difficult it is going to be because we think of it in big, broad, general themes.”
One person in just such a predicament Monday was Aida Fernandez, 27. She could be found seated in a tax preparation office on Western Avenue, waiting to have her returns processed.
“It’s called tax-phobia,” she said. “I don’t confront the subject because I really don’t understand all of it.”
Jellison’s advice for last-minute taxpayers: “Break the problem into small parts . . . and give yourself earlier deadlines.”
Meanwhile, habitual deadline pushers can look forward to 1995--the next time April 15 will fall on a Saturday.
