Glad nothing too terrible happened with the car - that's scary stuff. I always tell the mechanic when I expect to get the car back as I'm dropping off so in case it's not gonna happen I can get a loaner or a ride.
As for the IRS thing, my Dad worked there for a few years so I kind of know how this works. The details are boring, but here's the gist:
They run all returns through a bunch of algorithms that spit out things for review. Then the stuff gets graded and sorted and generally anything that looks like it'll result in a minimal change or less than $X money going in to the government doesn't get dealt with. However, if it looks like the government owes you anything, even a penny, or you might end up owing the gov't more than $X they start the process.
Once it's started it has to go through to its conclusion, which they're required to notify you about. In my case I had a pair of errors that offset and with dollar-rounding the result was that I owed an additional $0. I'm curious why they didn't apply dollar rounding in your case.
It's like any heuristic, though, and some percentage of the returns that do get re-examined end up being ones that shouldn't have kicked out in the first place. False positives, if you will. But since the gov't has started to muck with your return they're legally obliged to tell you that. This kind of makes sense because can you imagine how bad things could get if the IRS was allowed to muck with taxpayer returns and NOT tell people what they'd done? Yeah.
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branchandroot
Good on you
Date: 2013-06-07 03:52 pm (UTC)As for the IRS thing, my Dad worked there for a few years so I kind of know how this works. The details are boring, but here's the gist:
They run all returns through a bunch of algorithms that spit out things for review. Then the stuff gets graded and sorted and generally anything that looks like it'll result in a minimal change or less than $X money going in to the government doesn't get dealt with. However, if it looks like the government owes you anything, even a penny, or you might end up owing the gov't more than $X they start the process.
Once it's started it has to go through to its conclusion, which they're required to notify you about. In my case I had a pair of errors that offset and with dollar-rounding the result was that I owed an additional $0. I'm curious why they didn't apply dollar rounding in your case.
It's like any heuristic, though, and some percentage of the returns that do get re-examined end up being ones that shouldn't have kicked out in the first place. False positives, if you will. But since the gov't has started to muck with your return they're legally obliged to tell you that. This kind of makes sense because can you imagine how bad things could get if the IRS was allowed to muck with taxpayer returns and NOT tell people what they'd done? Yeah.