Taxing Taxing, Part 28

I work in payroll. When a worker wants to have a certain amount of money withheld from their taxes (or not), they have to fill out a form called a W-4 that states how much they want withheld.

In the old days, this was very simple: Workers counted how many dependents they had, wrote down a number based on that, and everybody got either a small refund at the end of the year, or a big one if they had the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Credit.

A few years back, we had a president, a guy named Donald Trump, who went and changed the withholding tables. Now you don’t count how many kids you have, you count the number of kids and multiply it by 2,000. You don’t just subtract one if you work another job; you have to calculate for yourself how much to withhold based on how much you expect to make at your other job.

This math is beyond most of our employees.

So then I started constantly getting complaints every April about how people’s refunds were too small.

I mentioned this to the director of the department, and I guess somehow that got everyone sent to a promotional speaker who explained that rich people don’t want refunds, they want to owe the government a small amount of money every year, so they’re not getting an interest-free loan.

I doubt that the interest on a thousand dollars for four months is worth much more than $20, but this got all of our employees fired up. So, they all changed their W-4s again and are now looking forward to owing money at tax time.

We have one employee, let’s call him Kevin. That’s not his name, I just like the way it sounds.

Kevin is 29, married to a woman who’s physically disabled, and has 7 kids with her. Kevin gets a truly gargantuan tax refund every year. Kevin has never before complained to me about his W-4s, or his withholding, or anything else: Kevin has zero federal and zero state withholding.

He does not give the government an interest-free loan of his money, as he doesn’t give them a single dollar of his money.

This year, just like everyone else, he comes in and changes his W4 in the hopes that this will make him owe at the end of the year. He’s excited for it! He wants the extra money in his pocket each paycheck.

Kevin does not notice at the time that his paycheck has not become any larger. His withholding is already zero.

April comes around, and for once, I get almost no complaints about people’s refunds. Everyone either got their Earned Income Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit refund, or owed about a thousand, and was weirdly happy about it.

Not Kevin. Kevin didn’t want a refund. Kevin wanted to go in. Kevin was P***ED.

He called me and complained for hours, calling back when I shut him down for not being productive, that he’d set things up to owe in, that he’d been told that he’d get more money by owing in, that he didn’t see a penny of more money during the year and now he has to suffer the indignity of giving the government an interest free loan?!

My patience is out. I tell him over and over that he’s not prepaid the government anything. I tell him over and over that the motivational speaker was not speaking about his situation. I tell him over and over that with his income and number of children, it’s impossible not to get a massive refund from the government.

Kevin’s been wasting my time for three or four days now, trying to talk me into somehow paying him for his Earned Income Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit in advance on his payroll. I’ve called his manager to explain and get him under control. I’ve called his and my department heads about the situation to try to get someone else to step in. I’ve asked for the duty of repeating these same facts to Kevin over and over to be passed on to someone on his management team, so I can do the god-d*** job I’m actually being paid for instead of arguing on the phone with a moron. Finally, on the recorded line, he utters a threat. “I’m gonna f****** beat you up if you don’t get me my money now.”

I’m exhausted and tired. This is exactly my ticket to no more Kevin.

So I report the threat and have him fired.

Do I feel good about it? No. Has he always been a good worker, up until now? Yes. Does he have seven kids to care for at home? Also yes.

But god-d***-it, it’s my job to make sure everyone working here gets paid correctly, I have about twenty people justifiably riding my a** about overtime pay that vanished into some sort of glitch in the system, which is an emergency, and a hundred more who somehow managed to operate our time system incorrectly and need a clock adjustment, which is not, and a hundred more tasks to complete in order to make sure everyone actually gets paid, all of which are much more important than explaining how taxes and withholding work to a guy who doesn’t want to listen.

Related:
Taxing Taxing, Part 27
Taxing Taxing, Part 26
Taxing Taxing, Part 25
Taxing Taxing, Part 24
Taxing Taxing, Part 23