The clock is ticking, people.

April 15 is almost upon us, and Uncle Sam wants his cut. Yes, the time has come for 1040s, W2s, depreciation, amortizations and those tax schedules that remind you of how little money you have. The $70,000 or $80,000 top brackets seem like a whole lot of moolah.

OK, most of you don’t have to worry about the complexities of itemizing deductions or amortizing your capital expenditures. The 1040ez and California’s 540ez are all most people here at Sacramento State have to worry about.

Your parents are taking the break from the Hope education credit and itemizing business expenses. You simply fill in the blanks from whatever W2s you got in the mail.

Oh, how I miss those days. This year, there was a nasty surprise in the mailbox. The 1099-misc turned my ritual 20-minute tax time effort and payoff a month later into a three-hour trial by triplicate.

The 1099-misc is the penalty for taking income as a consultant or contract worker and not an employee. It means no quick and easy cash-in on my perpetual poverty as student and part-time employee.

Wading into the paperwork involved in the 1040 seems like stepping into another world.

Jobs that you didn’t know even existed are given special consideration. Transactions that occur 3 or 4 times a year in the whole of the United States are covered with several pages of instructions and entire worksheets to determine what profit is taxable and what losses are deductible.

Farmers, miners (you know…iron ore) and people or companies that harvest timber find both breaks and intricate complexities that will make your head spin, shake and go rocketing around the room, trailing a jet of blood and fried brain matter.

As a reporter, my curiosity got the best of me. I tried to interpret andunderstand the smallest part of some of these exceptions.

What a mess.

A Certified Public Accountant gets paid to understand page upon page of tax code. Most even specialize in specific areas of tax law. Manufacturing, retail, agriculture and real estate are just a few defined subsets of these further specialties. What was I thinking?

After stopping to have a drink and a cigarette, I returned to a table strewn with receipts, pay stubs, scratch paper, verification forms and the various IRS “help” publications.

Renewed focus overcame frustration. Being systematic would get me through this mess.

“Ignore anything that doesn’t obviously apply to you,” was the advice from my cousin, who sat smirking on the couch.He finished his return in January. The check arrived in the mail weeks ago.

Keeping my head down, I worked late into the night eliminating the line items that didn’t apply to me. A not so simple process of elimination is the only way to describe the “Long Form” 1040.After another hour and a half of reading, calculating and referring back and forth between pages in the 2002 1040 Instructions, I had my schedules SE and C complete and the return roughed out.

I understood what I owed. I felt comfortable with my options. I only wish I had discovered the option to deduct the expense of using a tax advisor earlier in the evening.

It came down to this…I saved an extra $200 by spending the three hours it took to cut this Gordian Knot.

It wasn’t as difficult as I made it, either. Involved, boring, tedious, it was all of these things. But as long as I don’t get audited for playing fast and loose with the rules, the $200 can combat that.Now I only need to do my California return.

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