‘P’ Word and Queues : With 2 Extra Days, Tax Filers Line Up to Take Procrastination to the Limit
Larry Hustana was working himself into a lather, and he had made it only as far as the front door. He scowled as he noticed the sign deep inside the Ziggurat building.
Internal Revenue Service, it read.
“Gggrrrrr,” Hustana said.
No one needed to tell him or the dozens of other people waiting in line that Monday was the dreaded day. All were filing tax returns at the last possible moment.
“Let freedom ring,” one said as he walked away. Hustana concurred.
“On Easter Sunday, I had no trouble getting American Express on the line to get information about my credit card,” grumped the 65-year-old marketing consultant from Lake Forest. “They have a customer service rep on the phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But do you think I could get an IRS rep on the phone on Easter Sunday? Noooooooo. . . .”
Mark Schoonover, 26, a file clerk from Laguna Niguel, was feeling the same . . .
“Frustration,” Schoonover muttered. “It’s nothing but frustration. I usually get mine in early, but this year, I’m getting an extension. I kind of procrastinated.”
Ah, yes, the “P” word.
Gindy Barnard and Martha Sanchez know all about the “P” word, and they work for the IRS. They experience the “P” word in the people they wait on in the office here, and they have seen it result in frustration and even in shouts or sobs.
Both are public affairs specialists for the IRS, and Monday was no fun day for them. Neither left the building for lunch; and this year, like any other year, both experienced taxpayers who appeared to blame them for the fact that Americans must pay taxes at all.
Southern California is No. 1 in the nation in exercising the P word, Barnard said, noting that 20% of all U.S. taxpayers who file on the last day--this year’s deadline was Monday--live in Southern California. No other region comes close.
In fact, U.S. Postal Service officials said Monday that between 400,000 and 500,000 returns in Orange County alone were expected to carry the last-minute postmark of April 17.
So, it was no surprise to Barnard that a first-of-its-kind experiment staged in California on Monday, at the new Planet Hollywood restaurant in downtown San Diego, was a resounding success.
There, for a donation of $1.01 to the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation, taxpayers were allowed to “dunk” an IRS employee in a tub of cold water. Sanchez said the same thing may be tried by the IRS next year in Laguna Niguel.
In San Francisco, pie-throwing at IRS agents was the day’s exercise in venting frustration.
“Both were very popular,” Sanchez said.
*
Elsewhere around the county Monday, others were gritting their teeth for what the afternoon indicated would be a last-minute stampede.
“We are here to midnight, guaranteed,” said Jim Chambers, supervisor of an H&R; Block office in Irvine. “There will be people waiting to pick up returns at 11 p.m. to make a mad rush to the post office.”
Among the frantic were do-it-yourself tax filers who planned to calculate the figures on their computers Monday, only to find that some computer stores were sold out of the most popular software used for California taxes.
“I told them we wouldn’t be getting more because tax season is over,” said Mark Gregoli, supervisor of software sales for Frys Electronics in Fountain Valley, adding that five or six customers came looking for the TurboTax software.
Dan Dennis, a tax preparer in Newport Beach, said that while some last-day filers have legitimate reasons, such as a death in the family, most simply have an aversion to the unpleasant task of figuring taxes. Even the promise of refunds doesn’t sweeten the prospect for some.
“They don’t like to do income taxes,” Dennis said. “It is something they like to put off as long as they can and this year they got an extra two days to put it off,” since the deadline fell on a Saturday, automatically giving taxpayers until the next business day.
As usual, the U.S. Postal Service went out of its way Monday to accommodate the last-minute filers, with a dozen post offices in Orange County staying open past 11:59 p.m. so that all returns would have the requisite postmark.
*
Before that final gong sounded, Barnard and Sanchez spent the day fielding a flood of media inquiries, as well as taking last-minute calls from frenzied accountants wanting to know the terms of this or that regulation or why a certain computer code wasn’t working.
They said the government is busy devising new and easier ways of filing returns. But outside the IRS doors, no one was buying the idea that this would ever be easy or less painful.
“What we have to pay is entirely out of proportion to what we make,” said Tracey Hart, 40, who runs a secretarial services agency in Laguna Niguel.
And Schoonover, the Laguna Niguel file clerk, knows why.
“Waste,” he said. “That’s the thing I hate the most about it. What they spend money on. If they would spend money on attacking the deficit, it would make sense, but here we are bailing out another country,” meaning Mexico.
So who does Schoonover work for?
“A federal contractor--in this building,” he said with a laugh. “That’s why I know there’s so much waste.”
