I was down at the Chicago campus of Northwestern this morning helping law and medical students with their tax returns. Now I was only supposed to be there for two hours, but since the clock in the room hadn't been adjusted for Daylight Saving Time, I ended up staying an extra hour!
While that was kind of annoying, what's really frustrating is that most people are either unaware or just don't care about maintaining their visa status and being responsible enough to keep their tax stuff in order. You'd think that graduate law students would be aware of the consequences and know better but noooooo!
So many of the international students treat this whole thing as if it were an optional burden. Now while the rules can be confusing sometimes, it's hard to be patient with people who don't even make the effort to do it on their own and expect you to basically do their tax returns for them.
Unfortunately, asking them to do it on their own is not always the best alternative because many of them take their friends' advice or try their own creative interpretations without getting the information verified by anyone and then end up having to re-file or pay fines if their returns are audited by the IRS.
And it's not like they have to make too much of an effort to figure their stuff out properly - there's a tax presentation covering the basics that we prepared last year up on the International Office website, we've already had two tax presentations specifically for people who have no idea where to begin, and the IRS website itself has a wealth of information that you can use.
In my experience it's the know-it-all Law and Kellogg types that are the most annoying. I'm always tempted to tell such people, who come in without doing their groundwork, if they've heard of the RTFM directive (RTFM = Read The Fucking Manual!) but I end up phrasing it a little less abrasively. I honestly don't know how the International Office deals so patiently with these retards. GRRRRRRRRR!!!!!
Whew! Now that I've got that off my chest I feel a lot better. :) So then what happened?
