JULY is the cruellest month. T.S. Eliot claimed in ‘The Wasteland’ that it was April, but he was wrong. As anyone who has stared down June 30th knows, July brings with it a heavy burden of guilt.
You need to do your tax return, July whispers. And then it passes on the whisper to August and September, and often to the New Year.
‘I will show you fear in a handful of forms,’ Eliot wrote, or so he should have. Because there is nothing that scares me more than paperwork. Nothing squeezes my chest and constricts my breathing and clouds my mind like forms. Even writing an article about thinking about forms is making me highly anxious.
Formaphobia may not be in the DSM III of psychological disorders, but it’s a real phobia. I know this because I feel it. I become stressed and fearful when I have to do my filing, or pay a bill, or even generate an invoice. And God forbid I have to fill out an application form. I will procrastinate until the very last moment, then fight off panic as I begin the task.
And it’s not a fear of Maths or numbers that holds me back — I actually am pretty good at calculations — and it’s certainly not a fear of words. I’m a writer, for godsake. I work with words!
It’s something else, something visceral. My fight or flight reflex kicks in and I want to run. It’s not so much the tedium of the forms, though of course they are tedious to complete. It’s the fear of not knowing the answer to one of the questions — an estimate I’m guessing at wildly, a reference number I can’t easily find, a date I have got completely wrong.
If you are genuinely fearful of filling out forms, tax time is a nightmare. Source: istock
All forms are awful. Even applying for a Medicare refund is an exercise in willpower. I need my Medicare number. The provider number of the doctor. The provider number of the referring doctor. The date! The amount! It’s easier just to let the receipts pile up until I’ve run out of money and have sufficient incentive to lodge the claim.
And tax returns make Medicare refunds seem like a walk in the park. I am a competent working woman. I run a household. I’ve published books! But I am paralysed in the face of taxes. July rolls around and I begin psyching myself up to do them, and I am often still psyching myself up by April the following year.
Of course, I’m not the only one who fears taxes. Very few people other than accountants enjoy doing their taxes, and plenty of people are equally phobic. And the phobia crosses gender and socio-economic lines. Back in 2014, a former French Trade Minister, Thomas Thevenoud, caused outrage when he cited an ‘administration phobia’ for his failure to pay rent or taxes for three years.
I’m not so outraged. It makes perfect sense to me.
Now, Thevenoud evaded the payment of money. But what of those of us who evade receiving money? Plenty of us receive decent refund when we submit our tax returns, so why wouldn’t we hurry up and do it?
Recently, tax guru Dr Adrian Raftery, author of 101 Ways to Save Money on Your Tax, told News.com.au that he couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t claim money they’re entitled to.
But academics like Dr Raftery don’t appreciate the irrational nature of phobias. There is an overwhelm, a sense of oppression and powerlessness, that crushes logical thought. I have frequently forgone small refunds or cashback offers simply because the trauma of application is greater than the money I would have received. Raftery himself once submitted 33 years’ worth of returns for a client who was owed $70k in refunds.
I don’t have the solution for formaphobia, or tax phobia. I suppose a good therapist could help, but they’d make me fill out forms in their waiting room, and I just can’t do that again. So for now, I’ll continue to psych myself up to do my tax, and self-medicate with chocolate and cat memes.
And hopefully I’ll have my tax done sometime around April. Perhaps it is the cruellest month, after all.
Continue the conversation with Kerri Sackville on Twitter or Facebook.
Original article published here on News.com.au on 6 July 2017