Taxing Times

This weekend I spent as I have done in the corresponding weekend for the past twelve years in Spain: I worked online to file my U.S. income taxes. No matter when we start to gather and sort through the papers and files--and we started several weeks ago this year--it seems as though they never get finished until the last weekend before the filing deadline.

Online filing in Spain was not an alternative--it was the only way to get taxes in on time. Now I can't think of any other way to file my taxes, so when I saw in the Ohio instructions that as first-year residents we were not allowed to use the Ohio tax filing website to submit our forms, I was flummoxed.

I solved the issue by using the same TaxFreeUSA software that I had been using for years to file the federal return. That service apparently is permitted to file online for first-year residents, as I have just received an email saying that our Ohio return, filed online this afternoon, has been accepted. It wasn't easy wrangling the software, though. Because we have only lived in Ohio since July, we had to file as partial year residents. No problem, except that we also had to enter the other state that we had lived in for the first half of the year. That's the other state, not the other country. España does not appear in the list of states.

We got through that hassle only with the assistance of an email to the Help desk, but we did get through it. I don't really understand the flow of the Ohio forms, so I relied on the software for guidance through the laborious data manipulations. In addition to the problem of partial year residence, there are the issues of business and retirement income sources. I hope the software is right, because when all the additions and subtractions and divisions had been done, we owed surprisingly little tax for our first six months here, and I felt that Ohio had welcomed us with open arms. I imagine I will have a different feeling next year.

Federal and state out of the way, I turned my attention to a new tax jurisdiction for me: my local municipal taxes. This turned out to be the surprise of a lifetime. I had already visited the tax office in late summer and paid in advance the amount that the official there estimated might be a logical amount that I would owe for the year. Well, paying was a lot easier than figuring out the forms! Again, the problem was in the partial year resident calculation formulas. After two attempts in two days, I gave up, and I'll drop in at the tax office some time between tomorrow and Wednesday to get the form filled out correctly, and also pay the first installment of estimated taxes for the business for next year.

I can now look back fondly to the time when I only had to fill out one income tax form--the federal. Now I have three! But except for some tips on new items for record-keeping, I will put the forms out of my mind for another 50 weeks, when the whole process should be easier, although probably more expensive.