IRS Absurdity

Still working my way through an audit of our 2021 taxes. I have probably whined about it before, but this kind of thing is obviously just part of life and honestly provides me with good experience. If a client has a similar problem, I can provide counsel.

Which is not to say there are not utter absurdities in the details of the process. For instance, when sending something back to the IRS examiner in principle one can submit things online. The specs are below. A reasonable range of file types are in bounds, it all sounds OK. Until you look at the second to last bullet which lays out the types of special characters that cannot be included, which include the dollar sign, the comma, and parentheses.

Chew on that for a second. When sending something to the IRS purtaining to your taxes, a document -- even a pdf or a jpg, so basically an image file -- cannot contain dollar signs or commas. I tried several times to upload something but ultimately gave up, drove to the post office and sent it certified mail or some such. Maddening.