By Gregory Clark, April 19, 1924.
Residential Streets Deserted These Evenings, While the Children Are Put to Bed and Dad Struggles With His Tax Forms – If You’re Puzzled Lots of Your Clever Friends Can Help You.
O to be in jail, now that April’s here! O, to be a bachelor, earning about eight hundred dollars a year!
Blessed are the poor, for they don’t know what income tax forms are.
Do you know why the dominion government set the last day of April as the date income tax forms have to be in?
To save population. If the tax forms had to be made out in the dismal month of November or in the heat of the summer, hundreds would be jumping out of upstairs windows or running amok in the streets screaming: “Four per cent, less allowance for normal tax, on dividends, plus amount of surtax forward from No. 35 (ii). OO-wah!”
The next few evenings you will notice the streets deserted. The little children will be banished to bed. There will be no ratepayers out gardening. No voters ring gladly underneath their cars in the side drive. Save for the song of the robins, the gorgeous April evenings will be desolate.
Papa is indoors struggling with his income tax forms.
It’s a pity the ratepayers’ associations haven’t Instituted evening classes in the public schools during April to have chartered accountants give a course in “Mathematics for Taxpayers.”
“For once set out on paper, the whole thing is very simple,” says Hugh D. Patterson, dominion inspector of taxation for Toronto district. “Like any rules, the tax regulations have a formidable look. Tell the public that we have a special staff of men put on for the sole purpose of explaining the regulations to them, and if they strike difficulties, to bring them to the tax office and we will make their forms out for them.”
Mr. Patterson, who is not an, aged, grizzled and fearsome official like a Roman governor, but a young man with black hair and black eyes and an awful understanding of the most obscure things, and who can calculate fractions of fractions with an ordinary pencil, has made out two samples for the guidance of the poor rich.
Here’s the Way to Do It
People with moderate incomes have no trouble. It is the people with incomes over five thousand who need sympathy.
“So here are two examples, worked out step by step. If everyone follows these diagrams, step by step, they will come out all right.”
And, gentlemen, get your scissors. these in your hats. Here they are:
“Remember this,” added the inspector.
“The surtax is figured on your total income, if it is over $5,000, regardless of the other tax, regardless of your family, or dependents. Marital status has nothing to do with the surtax. The trouble is, to keep these two taxes separate, in your mind. Work out the normal tax, as shown. Then work out the surtax as an entirely different proposition. Follow the diagram.”
Much of the trouble people have is in not knowing their exemptions. Single men, as a rule, don’t know that they are exempt the two thousand if they have a dependent parent, grandparent, sister or, if over twenty-one, a brother mentally or physically incapacitated and totally dependent.
A single man who has one child dependent on him is exempt only the $300. A widower with one child, is exempt as a married man, as well as for the child.
All speculation is exempt. If you lose five thousand dollars on a speculation in oil stocks, your regular business being a clerk in an office, you are not exempt for the loss. If you win five thousand, you don’t have to include that in your earnings for the year.
But if you win a million dollars selling the government some bonds – that isn’t speculation – that’s business. And you have to include it under the head of commissions earned.
The main thing is, don’t guess. Call up the income tax office or go in and see them.
One Toronto man, in clearing up his wife’s estate after her death, made the discovery that she had never rendered an income tax return. He could not get an order to distribute the estate until he had satisfied the tax department. He had then to make out tax returns for every year since 1917, pay penalties for each year she had failed to make a return, and from 1920 on had to pay ten per cent. tax on the estate, interest accruing, for her failure to declare.
That estate, a good one, paid a handsome sum into the government.
No earthly excuse will be accepted for failing to render your tax return on or before April. 30. If you go on May the first and tell them that yesterday you were knocked down by a street car and were unconscious the whole of April 30, they will take the greatest sympathetic interest in your story, but it won’t save you the five per cent. of the tax penalty which the law calls for.
No Excuse For Anyone
One Toronto man, wealthy, was in Florida and was having such a good time he forgot all about taxes. He paid a penalty that equalled the cost of his trip to Florida. Another man was at sea, on his way home, on April 30. He had to pay the penalty.
“No excuses are provided for in the act. Therefore no excuses exist, as far as the department is concerned,” said Mr. Patterson.
A man was in hospital for several weeks before and after April 30. He was undergoing operations and was near death’s door. Nobody thought about income tax returns. But he paid the penalty just the same as the careless man. Nobody gets away. Professional entertainers, the great musicians and artists who only come to Toronto for a visit of twenty-four hours pay taxes on the income of an hour’s singing. Massey Hall makes its return of money taken in and paid out. The government writes to the artist’s agent in New York – and to make future visits possible the artist comes across with her tax.
People who are leaving the country for good are usually Interviewed before their departure and taxes are collected. There are various ways the department gets word of their intended departure – often a letter from a neighbor.
The government has actually collected taxes from bootleggers, as such. That is, the department reads in the newspaper of a conviction of someone as a bootlegger. Looking up records, they note no income recorded. So they pay a visit to the convicted party and demand to see his bank books. They examine back records of the bank account. They demand a proper income return. And the bootlegger, alarmed at the possibilities of prosecution, renders returns on his ill-gotten gains.
“The policy of the department,” said Mr. Patterson, “is to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, as far as prosecution in the courts is concerned, until the act has been in force long enough for everyone to thoroughly understand it. We do come across many cases where returns have not properly been filed. All we do is secure the return and collect the money, with full penalties exacted., We do not often prosecute. But instructions are likely to be promulgated at any time for a tightening up of the regulations, and prosecutions will be in order.”
A final instruction is this: no one knows better how to make an income tax form than people who don’t have to make them out. If you have one of these amongst your friends, get him to make yours out.
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