So how much do I owe in taxes?

The story starts with a fuck up. When I moved to my new apartment and they were getting some work done on thier mailboxes so I decided to get a PO box at the local post office to make things simpler. Well when I filed my taxes I put down my physical address as my mailing address and almost a year later I finally opened up my mailbox to find it crammed with tons of junk mail and five letters from the IRS.

For those outside the US, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the people that collect and process your taxes. I usually never get mail from them so when I saw these five letters, my mind started rushing to conclusions and I before I even opened them I assumed it was going to be five demands for money, each amount being larger than the last. When I opened the letters I found something a bit different.

I open the first letter to find that I owe $320 for my 2020 tax year. Ok not the end of the world but certainly not a bill I would like to pay. This letter was dated close to a year ago so I assumed the others would be worse. Open the second to find a slightly larger amound of $330 and then I go to open the third and find an amount of…$150. There seem to be no extra explanation of this so I proceed to open the next letter to find an amount of $160. Finally I open the last letter to find a refund check for $250…

At this point I arrange the letters in order of which they were mailed out, the IRS adds a “Notice Date” to the top right of each correspondence so that helped paint a clearer timeline. And the timeline went:

• I owe $320
• I owe $330
• I owe $150
• I owe $160
• The IRS owes me $215

Oh and the cherry on top is the refund check they sent me is for $220 and not $215, and there seems to be no additional documentation to show how the IRS managed to get from one number to the other and all the documents are from the same tax year. I’m truly baffled with this one.