Tax Season Tribune

It was St. Patrick’s Day this past week, which means one thing for most Americans: green beer, corned beef, and a brief but sincere wish that they had been born Irish.

For tax professionals, however, it means something slightly different: green beer, corned beef, and a brief but sincere wish that the Tax Code contained a four-leaf clover deduction.

It doesn’t. We checked.

The Irish have long had their own approach to taxes — namely, keeping them refreshingly low. Ireland’s corporate tax rate became the stuff of legend (and more than a few Congressional hearings), drawing tech giants and multinationals to Dublin the way leprechauns are drawn to gold.¹ Apple, Google, and Facebook all discovered that the Emerald Isle had a pot of gold at the end of its rainbow: a 12.5% corporate tax rate with an even lower effective rate for savvy taxpayers. Apple reportedly paid an effective rate of well under 2% on its Irish profits at one point, a fact that managed to unite American senators and European regulators in shared outrage.²

The vehicle of choice was something called the “Double Irish.”³ No, it’s not a coffee order, it’s a tax structure that allowed multinationals to shuffle profits through Irish subsidiaries and dramatically reduce their global tax bills. Ireland eventually agreed to phase it out following international pressure, but not before it had served its purpose.

Meanwhile, American tax professionals spent this year’s St. Patrick’s Day the same way they spend every other day between January and April: hunched over a stack of documents, subsisting on cold coffee (or maybe a double Irish coffee?), and fervently hoping for the luck of the IRiSh.

So if you happen to find a four-leaf clover between now and April 15, hold on to it. You’re going to need it.

Erin go bragh — and may your extensions be automatic.

If there’s one thing that individual tax preparers have in common, it’s a universal dread — the soul-crushing ritual of indecipherable forms, calculators, and hours of work ending in despair over underwhelming refunds.

Here are some circulating tweets that capture the anxiety and dejection that comes with procrastination, frustration, and realizing your tax refund is basically pocket lint:¹

1. My son asked what taxes are, so I gave him a bag of m&m’s and explained that he has to give some to me and I know how much he has to give me but he has to guess himself and if he’s wrong he goes to prison.
2. Just did my own taxes, I should be in jail by Friday.
3. I’m putting the 3 people that use my HBO account as dependents on my taxes.
4. Turbo Tax is the worst computer game ever.
5. Going to urgent care to file my taxes.
6. It’s called Gross Pay because it’s disgusting to see how much money you would’ve made before taxes.
7. “You’re almost 22, you should have learned about taxes in high school.” First of all, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
8. Tax-wise, it would make more sense if your business was built on giving away free, actual medieval lances, rather than freelancing.
9. I just paid my taxes. The roads should be fixed any day now.
10. I should start doing my taxes, but I can’t seem to get Intuit.
11. Got my tax refund, and I might just go nuts. Probably buy some name-brand aluminum foil, and with what is left over, maybe an avocado.
12. I’m glad I learned about parallelograms instead of how to do taxes. It really comes in handy this parallelogram season.

There’s nothing like a little shared misery to help everyone make it through another filing season (also see “A word of encouragement” above).