Little so sure as taxes

United States founding father Benjamin Franklin, famously said that “the only things certain in this world are death and taxes”

If there is any “good news” regarding the annual tax day event, this year we will have until the April, 18 because April, 15 falls on Friday. The nationally dreaded tax deadline still looms less than two weeks from now.

Kimball is fortunate to have three certified public accountants to choose from to help with this dreaded chore annually.

One of those individuals, Wynema Engstrom, has been available to help since the fall of 1998 and estimates that she completes between 425 to 475 tax returns annually, and that most of those are personal returns.

According to Engstrom, her tax season begins around October of each year after they have filed for extensions for some of their customers from the previous year’s taxes. October is also the time that she begins preparing the proper documents and working on tax estimates.

“We start getting the proper documents in order early to be prepared when our time is limited after the first of the year,” she said. “We start during the year to get any and all bookkeeping done during the year and not wait until January to start it. I do between 40-60 hours of education every year to prepare.”

Robert Abramson, like Engstrom, is an independent local CPA and has prepared returns for several years in addition to daily duties. Due to the hectic schedule accounting firms keep at this time of the year, a request for more information, was not returned.

Enrolled agent Tim Anderson has been preparing returns for 26 years, beginning in Kimball and branching out to several locations in the Panhandle.

According to Anderson, his seasonal work begins around the second week of January each year and that the preparer season begins much earlier with the continuing tax training.

Of the nearly 600 returns Anderson prepares annually, he stays busy with personal returns during the tax season, but after the April deadline, he is busy with business returns.

“There are several IRS-related scams circulating again, some of them with new twists. The most common in this area has been a telephone call demanding payment of a past due amount with the added threat of the victim being arrested and prosecuted,” he said. “A second is an IRS email or telephone call asking the victim to verify their Social Security Number, bank information, and other personal information. Our office staff is available to answer any questions about these or any other tax concerns.”

The history of collecting taxes first started during the Civil War, from 1862 to 1872, according to the Library of Congress, due to the destructive warfare engulfing private property and civilian populations, as well as commissioned combatants – prompting the need for alterations in government financing.

Though differing fiscal strategies were used by the Union and the Confederate governments, each strategy sustained each side during the war.

The strategy used in the north proved to be more efficient overall, and the South enjoyed one of the lightest taxed societies at that time in history.

In 1894, when Grover Cleveland was the U.S. President, the government once again levied an income tax, approved by the Congress, but the tax was ruled unconstitutional one year later by The Supreme Court.

Those in support of taxation worked to amend the Constitution and in 1913 the Sixteenth Amendment was made officially valid and Congress was given the power “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census of enumeration.” This was considered a great accomplishment by the Democratic Party during this time.

According to TIME magazine, Congress passed nearly 1,000 pages of Internal Revenue Code revisions. Lawmakers rewrote and tightened many provisions of the tax laws concerning gifts, trusts and partnerships, and moved the filing deadline from March 15 to April 15 each year.