Taxes

I did my first tax return when I was seventeen.  I'd had other jobs, but only short term and low paid.  I suspect that my parents thought I should learn how to do taxes.  I think they helped a bit with getting my Social insurance number, but, as usual, in terms of actually teaching me to do things, they basically threw me into the deep end and left me to it.

I was, at the time, both in my first year of university, and working as the Circulation Manager for the Kerrisdale Courier.  It's a weekly, so they only published on Thursday, and I didn't have any classes on Thursday, so I could do it.  And, at tax time, they pulled a fast one on me.

I dropped off the bundles of papers for our delivery boys.  When we got new delivery boys, I bught them paper delivery bags, and got reimbursed by the company.  I also hired day labour workers to do "free" delivery in selected areas, to try and build circulation.  I paid the workers (piece rates), and got reimbursed.  I also would buy office supplies at times, and even bulk coffee supplies for the lunch room.  And get reimbursed.

Then came tax time.  And my T4 didn't reflect what I got paid, but totalled up every cent of every cheque the company had given me.  It totalled somewhere more than four times what I had actually been paid, and would have made a huge difference in what I was charged in income tax, probably making me owe more money than I actually had left.

So I called Revenue Canada, as it then was.  And the nice man on the phone said, yes, that was a problem, and I could challenge the T4, but it might be a lot of trouble, and he suggested that I fill out my taxes as if I owned my own business, a "sole proprietorship," as it was called.

I'd kept a really detailed ledger of what I had received and spent that year, so I did that.  After taking off all the stuff I had paid out on behalf of the Courier as "expenses," I came out with a small enough number that I'm not sure I paid any taxes that first year.  And, what with doing taxes as if I had owned my own business (just by following the guides from Revenue Canada), doing the taxes ahs never held any terrors for me.  When Gloria and I got married, I took over the taxes and did both of us every year, sometimes doing them three or more ways in order to see which was most cost-effective.  (When Number Two Daughter paid us back the loan for her accounting training, she said that we'd never have to do taxes again, but we never took her up on that  :-)

But, while taxes have never held any terror, they have become increasingly irksome over the years.  Not that I have any specific or generalized objection to paying taxes: we need taxes to make the country run.  But I used to be able to hold a mathematical model of the tax form in my head, understanding that an increase in the number *here* meant a decrease over *there*, and why that was so.  Now it's pretty much impossible.  The forms are a complicated maze, and greater in number, and of greater complexity, and there is no telling what impact this number *here* will make over *there*.  Even simple pension income comes in multiple parts, with certain amounts being entered in wildly disparate locations on the tax forms, and only CRA knows what they mean (if, in fact, CRA *does* know what they mean), or what impacts they have.

A few years ago, the numeric references of the entry fields on the tax forms went from three digits to five.  Doesn't the fact that they decided that a one thousand entry field address space was too small, and jumped to one hundred thousand, tell you that taxes are just getting too complicated?