The Tax Holiday

With taxes due in exactly one week, procrastinators everywhere are scrambling to finish their taxes so as to avoid the IRS radar.  My initial advice is to not wait until the week before taxes are due before starting them.  However, we are a busy society and if you find that you are a procrastinator, that advice is too little too late.  As an attorney, many of my family members have asked me if I do taxes.  The truth is that I was never very good at numbers and I dread doing my taxes more than the average person.  Being an attorney and having some knowledge of the tax laws, you would think that I would be willing to endure that torture in order to avoid paying an accountant.  The truth is that the process and anticipation is too painful. This year, I hired an accountant to do my taxes.

It is not that I don't know how to fill out a 1040, its just that my taxes are no longer that simple and even if they were, I don't enjoy filling out a 1040.  My disdain for doing my own taxes is such that I encourage our government to change the income based tax system to something less citizen-accountant driven.  The only problem with that kind of extensive overhaul is that it would put all accountants out of business, which might be counter-productive.

Although attorneys are capable of doing your taxes, an attorney is not necessarily going to do a better job than an accountant, and the attorney is probably going to charge more.  If you do have an attorney complete your taxes, my advice is to choose an attorney that generally does transactional work, rather than litigation.  Transactional attorneys are generally more comfortable working with numbers and litigation attorneys work more often with the written word.  Find an attorney that you know has done yours or someone else's taxes in the past.  Although you won't find me doing individual taxes for clients, other attorneys market that practice area and are good at it.  Remember: Just because your attorney agrees to do the work, does not mean that your attorney is good at it or has experience doing it.  It is your job to check credentials, if you don't, you may find yourself in an expensive, intrusive, & exhausting audit.

April Fool's

I was never much of a prankster on April Fool's Day.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a practical joke as much as the next person.  Its just that April first sneaks up on me so quickly, and good practical jokes come in one of two ways: they are either carefully planned out to perfection, or they just fall into your lap in a way that could not have been planned and unfold perfectly by coincidence.  I was never very good at creating practical joke plots just for the sake of the first of April but for those that can pull it off, I have some advice. 

Through marriage last year, I inherited a family full of April Fool's jokesters and I wanted to provide some practical advice that may prevent a fun joke from turning into major legal trouble.

According to the law, if you intend your actions, you are responsible for the consequences, regardless of whether you intended or could have foreseen those consequences.  If your joke does not go as planned, you may be responsible for damage to personal property or injury to a person.

My advice is to save your practical jokes for your close friends and family members at home and opt not to participate in April Fool's jokes at work.  If you save your pranks for home, you will avoid the potential for getting fired and from having to continue to work with someone that doesn't think you are funny.  Things are more likely to go awry when there are many people involved and the more people involved, the more humiliated the subject will feel.  If something does go wrong, your friends and family members will be more forgiving and will be less humiliated.

If you do choose to participate at work, do not set up scenarios where someone could get hurt or property could get damaged.  Most importantly, consider all possible consequences of your actions.  By doing so, you can avoid becoming a fool of April Fool's.