Yesterday afternoon as I was walking in the door, Dennis almost didn’t let me get my jacket off. He had a letter in his hand and his look was serious. It was from Minnesota Revenue. Yup . . . those letters are usually serious. We were being notified that we had not filed a 2015 Minnesota Income Tax return. Ya right! As someone, while I had been working, could have had their Minnesota Assessor’s License revoke for such a non-action, there is no way I would allow such a misstep as this to happen to Dennis and me. I assured Dennis I would get on it in the morning.
This morning I helped Dennis get packed up for a gun show at Mitchell, South Dakota. After the exhaust fumes had left the driveway, I headed for the paper trail of our tax returns. With the 2015 tax info on the dining room table, I went online to see what my options were. I settled on several telephone numbers. It was a good thing I had plenty of breakfast coffee left as I was on hold for some time.
I answered quite a few questions before we got to the nitty-gritty. There was an exact time dollar amount showing up in our records that is pending with no tax return attached to it. I also had a printed out copy of a computer generated “Pay MN Tax” receipt of the amount needed. It had the last four numbers of the credit card on it as well as the date, March 21, 2016, which would have been the date I electronically filled our returns. Monday morning I will mail copies of all of our info and see what shakes out. In between time, in the mean time, I called our credit card and got a rep on the phone. Our credit card has switched from a Visa to a MasterCard since that time. For the whopping amount of $5.00 I will receive a copy of the credit card statement for that time frame. Time will tell what shakes out. If in fact the amount was charged on the credit card at that time, it will work to our benefit if they want to add on a late charge.
Ya know . . . I wonder how some of our fellow senior citizens work through issues such as these. As luck would have it, 40 plus years of working with records and numbers has taught me to take fairly good care of our business. What would have been perfect is if I had saved in a folder the emails that are sent out after electronically filling that stated something to the effect that “Your Minnesota Tax Return for 2015 has been successfully been accepted.” You can be sure that next year I will have it nailed down. Ironically it takes about three years before situations that happened in the world of income tax in 2015 to hit the fan. I did not know that. I will also make sure to keep better notes on the copies of future income tax returns. Will I be hearing from the federal . . . I am not going to sweat it. Time will tell.