15 Apr 2026

Life and taxes

Celebrating the U.S. taxpayer with Joe MacLeod

Today: Joe MacLeod, Editor of INDIGNITY and author of the column MR. WRONG.

Issue No. 544

I Was a Taxman

by Joe MacLeod

Today, April 15, is “Tax Day” in the United States of America, ugh. It’s really the deadline for filing your income tax forms (ugh), but everybody knows what you mean when you say “Tax Day,” ugh.

Ugh! For so many reasons. In no particular order, it’s a deadline, which nobody likes, it’s got “dead” in it, plus—even if you might be getting a refund—for a lot of people, doing taxes is hard. Math! I don’t like math, I am not good at math, and I especially don’t like math if it’s attached to being in trouble with the government. I know you can hire people or get a robot to do your taxes, but you still have to get the numbers together and think about numbers and math. It’s boring! When I say “it’s boring” I mean I don’t want to, because it’s hard.

I had a temp job once at the office of the Comptroller of Maryland. I worked in a large windowless space in the basement, the mail room, sorting tax forms. You’d imagine lots of this stuff happens on the internet nowadays, but a lot of it still happens on paper, all kinds of tax stuff, individual tax filing, businesses, quarterly estimated tax payments, amended filings, a bewildering array of forms for estate, fiduciary, withholding, schedules, payment checks—I can’t really remember, there were forms like 502, and 502AE, and 502B, and 502X, and 515, and MW506AE, and MW507, and PV (Personal Tax Payment Voucher for Form 502/505, Estimated Tax and Extensions), and then a zillion forms for business stuff, all sent to one address, all ending up in one mailroom.

There were shopworn workstations set up for people to open mail, you’d sit or stand at one of the purpose-built laminated-MDF desks complete with a rack to hold a plastic USPS tray or one of those ubiquitous semi-opaque filmy-plastic tubs full of mail retrieved from the nearby post office, sorted by size in a nearby room full of noisy machinery. The tubs and trays would be stacked onto rolling carts about six feet high, and there were days when the racks filled the room and you felt like you were being attacked. The workstations also had a grid of pass-through shelving with places for you to put each sorted form from the desk side, and for someone to walk by and remove the forms from the other side. Each station had a letter opener, a stapler, a staple remover (critical), scissors, and a pen. You had to wear surgical gloves to handle the mail, otherwise you’d end up with grimy, inky, death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts hands.