A Word of Caution If You DIY Your Taxes

I want to talk about taxes this morning. Not because I enjoy it.

Because we just spent four days inside a system that was designed by people who already know how it works, for people who are supposed to already know how it works, with zero tolerance for the people who do not.

Here is what happened to us. Maybe it happened to you too.

We sat down to e-file our federal and state returns. Simple situation. Social Security income. A small LLC that showed zero income for the year. Should have taken an hour. It took four days and nearly took our marriage with it.

The federal return came back rejected. The reason — an AGI mismatch. The IRS uses your prior year adjusted gross income as a PIN verification. If what you enter does not match what they have on file, the door does not open. No explanation. No guidance. Just rejected.

We did not know what number they had. We had to dig out our 2024 return to find it. Fourteen thousand five hundred and twenty nine dollars. That specific number. One digit off and you are locked out. The system does not tell you what the right number is. It just tells you that yours is wrong.

Then the Kentucky state return. Rejected for a different reason. A FEIN mismatch on the LLC filing. The Federal Employer Identification Number on record did not match what the system expected. Again no guidance. Just a door that would not open.

Then the account number they had on file did not match. Then the PIN. That too.

Four separate walls. Each one invisible until you ran into it face first.

Here is what I want you to understand. None of these things are your fault when they happen to you. The IRS system, the state system, the tax software — they are all talking to each other in a language they never taught you. They assume you know the handshake. They assume you filed the same way last year, with the same numbers, from the same account, with the same PIN, and that nothing changed.

Life changes things. Numbers change. Accounts change. Situations evolve. The system does not care about any of that. It cares about the match.

And here is the part that makes it worse. The people staffing the other end of the phone — when you can reach them — are often not equipped to help you. The IRS has faced years of staffing cuts and turnover. Qualified workers who understand the nuances of what you are dealing with are harder to find than they used to be. You can wait an hour on hold and get someone reading from a script who cannot tell you why your specific return is being rejected or what number the system actually has on file. The negligence is not always individual. Sometimes it is institutional. A system stretched too thin to serve the people it exists to serve.

So you are left alone with a rejection notice and no roadmap.

We nearly mailed everything. Certified mail, keep the receipts, let the post office handle what the software could not. That was the plan. Old technology. Still works. A mailed return postmarked by the deadline is a filed return, full stop, and no AGI mismatch can touch it.

But then something shifted. We went back through everything carefully. Found the correct AGI from the 2024 return — line 11, exactly as filed, not rounded, not estimated, that exact number. Got the right account information. Sorted the PIN. Went back in and e-filed all of them.

Every one accepted.

Four days of stress. Four days of rejection notices and a household running hot. Resolved in one sitting once we had the right numbers in the right boxes.

That is the part the system never tells you either. It is not always broken. Sometimes it just needs exactly what it asked for and nothing more. The problem was never the returns. The problem was the missing information that nobody thought to tell us we needed until we ran out of road.

Two lessons. Know your prior year AGI before you sit down to file. Pull your 2024 return. Find line 11. Write that number down before you open the software. And if your state and federal are rejecting separately — do not assume they are the same problem. They are two different doors with two different locks.

When the system rejects you, do not assume the worst. Assume a missing number. Find it. Try again.

We did. It worked.

And if it does not work for you — print it, sign it, mail it certified. The deadline does not care how the envelope got there.

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“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack