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Maybe-just maybe-there is help on the Internet. So you fire up your trusty Pentium, wake up your 56K modem, dial up your ISP, connect to the Net, and aim your browser at http://www.irs.gov. Up pops the IRS home page. There's not much there-a picture in the center of the page, nice color. You page up. You page down. Not much else. What to do? Look at the screen again. Oh. It says, "Open here for some exciting news on how to communicate with the IRS." You click, and the second page comes into view. You start reading it. Doesn't look like there's anything you want here. Wait! Hold it! There's a slider on the right. Maybe there's more below. You slide to the bottom of the page and check out the list of options. Click on "Forms and Pubs." That's what you want-maybe. At the bottom of the next page you see "Forms and Instructions" and "Publications." You click on the former. On this page you slide down to a list window and find there are 680 items. Now you begin to wonder if a sales tax would not be simpler. Ctrl/Left-click highlights all the 'Forms and Forms Instructions" of interest. You wonder if you missed any. At the bottom of the page you click on "Review Selected Files" and a listing of your selected items appears. You click on the first item and find instructions on how to download or view each of the selected documents. One by one you complete your downloads at 3.2K bytes per second. Now you return to the second page,
slide to the bottom and click on "Pubs Online." And,
lo, here Well, we feel pretty good right now but begin to wonder if we might have missed something. You know you were a little blurry-eyed trying to pick out items of interest from 800 titles, so you go back to the second page again, slide to the real bottom of the page and click on the "Search Icon." A new page comes into view and you enter "IRA" into the search field, click, and get a list of more than 100 items. You start reading, and a spouselike voice from another room says, "It's four o'clock in the morning and you have to get up for work in an hour." Ah, there it is-Form 4868. (You really didn't know the number and can't find it under "Late Filing." Thank God it's Friday. The banks are open. Where's that copy of dacs.doc? |
| Charlie Bovaird is a longtime DACS director and the trusty, tireless and unflappable steward of the organization's membership database and treasury. You can e-mail Charlie at aam@mags.net. |
SO you're
running out of time and want a tax form today. You can't find
that copy of TurboTax you bought last January, and the library
just closed. You know they changed the tax laws again, and you
think you can save a few bucks but aren't really sure. Your visions
of sugarplums are fast becoming nightmares of dollars going down
the drain. You wonder if you'll sleep tonight.