according to the IRS. The story began when I received a scary looking envelope in the mail. Never had a problem with taxes before so what could this official letter possibly contain? Simply a statement claiming we owed over $30,000 in back taxes from a couple of years back.

Hmm…deep breath  here. Must be a mistake. Repeat this phrase several times while trying to focus on the legal terms and phrases contained in said letter and not panic. Repeat, not panic.

Since the letter came on a Friday, I immediately called the toll free number and finally connected with a real person to sort out this dilemma so it wouldn’t hang over our heads all weekend. Fortunately the kind employee walked me through the process till we found the problem. Their problem. Not mine. Somewhere, someone on their end had incorrectly entered a $750.00 payment I recorded and changed it to $75,000. Oh what a difference a little decimal point or comma makes! On a tangent here, what a difference one little word can make in our stories or articles!

Anyway, I informed the employee that I would be most happy to pay any back taxes if I had in fact cleared $75,000 for one article. Wow, if only. Breathing a bit easier, I hung up the phone and immediately went to my records to verify what we had discussed. All was reported correctly on our end, including a copy of the right form which had the right figure and which they must have had a copy of.  Okay, we’re all human and we all make mistakes. I made copies of all my writing income from that year (trust me, it really wasn’t that much!) and mailed them all in with the form. After a few more phone calls, and receiving mail that reduced the balance but still didn’t cover all the bases, we finally received the final statement that we owed….0. God is good, all the time.

Moral of the story: Be sure to keep excellent copies of all of your writing records, expenses, income and tax statements. It would have been a hassle if I had to sort through piles of papers to locate the information I needed. I had the requested information readily available and was very thankful I had bothered to keep good records. You never know, this could happen to you!