A Minor Moral Defeat

I’ve been doing my taxes by hand since—well, since I’ve had to file taxes.  Granted, in the beginning, it was easier.  Technically, EZ.  But I have taken a certain amount of misguided pride in this yearly ritual.  I grab my number two pencil and the instruction book from the IRS, and hang out with a bad movie on cable.  In recent years I’ve made a small concession to my own fallibility: I check my math with a little red calculator.

I’ve filed in as many as three states in a year, and each year there seems to be another form I need to fill out.  Friends and acquaintances seem shocked when I ignore their suggestions for tax software.  Come on.  I’m a math junky.  This isn’t even hard math.

Last night I breezed through my federal return.  Connecticut didn’t take me much longer.  I made it three quarters of the way through New York when I hit a wall. For three months last year I lived in New York and worked in Connecticut.  Both states expected me to pay taxes on this income.  In the New York instructions, I found a vague reference to credit for taxes paid to another state, but try as I might, I couldn’t find any information on how to actually claim it.  I searched and searched, but kept coming up empty.

And so for the first time ever (when it comes to taxes), I gave up.  I completed everything online in TurboTax.  And that silly little software that I’d avoided using for more than a decade increased my return.  Substantially.  I guess this is one more piece of evidence that I am in fact fallible.