What about a "hatchet of lobbyists"? Or a "fatcat"? Is a "Gucci of lobbyists" too obvious? I got nothing, people. Do your best (or worst) in the comments.
So capital market servants, filed your tax returns yet? No? Too busy, you say? Fine. We’ve all got our excuses. Personally, we’re holding out until Doug Shulman and/or Tim Geithner start returning our calls about their compliance efforts for 2009. Since we’ve been encouraged to not hold our breath on this, we’ve already filed our extension.
But where are most of the kings of putting off the 1040 until the last minute? The greatest concentration of “I’ll do it this weekend” types? The engineers of procrastination station?
Well if you guessed Houston not only are you correct but you’ve got more useless knowledge in your brain than Ken Jennings.
TurboTax’s rankings are based on the largest number of people that file between April 14 – 17. Here are your biggest putter-offers for 2009 (with previous year ranking in parents):
1. Houston – (#2)
2. Chicago – (#4)
3. New York – (#3)
4. Austin, Texas – (#11)
5. San Francisco – (#1)
6. Seattle – (#7)
7. San Diego – (#5)
8. Los Angeles – (#8)
9. Dallas – (#9)
10. Las Vegas – (#10)
This marks the fourth time that H-town has topped this list but we’ll be damned if we can figure out why. Does the humidity and obesity cause a hibernated state that we’re not aware of or is just good old fashioned, “we’re Texans and we hate taxes”? California too. What the hell is their problem?
In order to get to the bottom of this, we asked a friend (and strangely enough, a tax guru) who is a current Los Angeles resident and former resident of Houston to explain and she put in this way:
“Well.. Californians are selfish and think they can do whatever they want to get theirs…and pretty much Texans are the same, but they do it with a smile and an accent.”
Are you dreading April 15th North Jersey? Thought so. With just over a week to go until deadline, it may have crossed your minds that you should start tearing your house apart for that W-2.
Well, you can postpone the treasure hunt for now because the IRS is showing mercy on you for the Biblical rainfall that poured on the Garden State last month.
The IRS announced on Monday that they are delaying the filing deadline “for taxpayers who reside or have a business in the disaster area. This includes the April 15 deadline for filing 2009 individual income tax returns, making income tax payments and making 2009 contributions to an individual retirement account (IRA).”
The counties declared a disaster area by the POTUS include Atlantic, Bergen, Cape May, Essex, Gloucester, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Passaic, Somerset, and Union and thus qualify for the extended deadline, which is now May 11th.
Don’t try to get cute though, Garden Staters, if you’re thinking you can falsely claim residency in one of the affected counties, the IRS will be all over your shit, “IRS computer systems automatically identify taxpayers located in the covered disaster area and apply automatic filing and payment relief.” So appreciate the compassion if you can get it but don’t get any ideas; the IRS is still watching.