Tax Question? Don't Bother Calling The IRS for Help

This morning I was on the phone bright and early calling the IRS with a couple of simple tax questions. I was on hold for probably 10 minutes at first. The first woman I talked to asked me how she could direct my call. I said I had two questions; one about interest income for a minor and the other one regarding a 1099-G we received. She said I'll send you over to this department for one question and they might know the answer to the second one too.

More on-hold time. Another woman answers and I asked her the 1099-G question regarding filing a non-resident State return. My husband works for a company in another state so we have to file that state's return. We received the 1099-G and it gave us instructions on how to use the amount of last years refund this year but ONLY if we filed Schedule A. After I finally realized that I didn't use Schedule A last year, I repeated to the agent "OK, since I didn't use a schedule A, then I can disregard this notice as it states?"

"Well, THEORETICALLY........but I'm going to transfer you to someone else because that's not my department."

So off to wait in on-hold land again. Another woman comes on and I figure I have my first question answered so I move on to the next one. I explain that my daughter is 13 and has a savings account, do I need to report the interest income? She asks me all these questions and then said, "OK, I'm going to put you on hold while I check on the answer to that." When she finally comes back she starts reading something from form 550 and all I heard was blah, blah, blah. When she was done I said "OK, so what's the answer, because that made absolutely no sense to me. Can't you answer just Yes or No or in some language that I can understand?"

She laughed and then apologized and said "OK, well I'm going to have to put you on hold while I go check that out for you." Again I wait, while my husband and I are laughing our asses off. The phone has been on speaker phone all this time. I now have to go to the bathroom so take the phone in with me. While I'm sitting on the toilet, she comes back and asks me some more questions. While I'm trying to answer them she said "Oh my computer is acting up, let me put you on hold while I try and figure this out."

OH HELL NO! I said "No way, I've been on the phone for 48 minutes and this was the simplest question in the world. It should not take this long." And then I flushed.

I swear to God, I think they hire people to read from a computer to ask questions and then get the computer to spit out an answer. These people are not trained in taxes at all. They are trained to ask asinine questions and then confuse you with their asinine answer.

So I'm going to answer my own questions and ignore the 1099-G and include my daughters interest income with ours. I'll worry about it later when they audit me.