This story resonates a bit with me. Some years ago, I did some freelance work. I made a good faith effort to do all the tax paperwork. In my naive zeal, I fu

This story resonates a bit with me. Some years ago, I did some freelance work. I made a good faith effort to do all the tax paperwork. In my naive zeal, I fucked up the forms, and somehow reported the same income twice. What they were asking me to pay was basically the profit I made on the project after expenses. I think I spent 80 hour assembling materials and corresponding with the IRS to try to explain what had happened. Every time it seemed like I was about to get through to a real human who could understand, I was starting all over. I did go to a professional when I was about halfway through the saga. They did not really know what to do. They just wrote another one of the same kinds of letters that I had been writing. Maybe the extra tax jargon in it helped. I don't know. Ultimately I only had to pay a small fraction of what they were asking, but it left me with a phobia of taxes. The rules appeared to be arbitrary and unknowable (to me) and yet I was still responsible for complying.