Throughout the year, the postperson delivers mounds of tax-relevant paperwork to my door mounds of paperwork. The document proessing system at my house is as follows:
- An envelope arrives, addressed to me. Snail mail is displayed on the lounge room coffee table.
- If I don’t touch it within 12 hours, the envelope may be inadvertantly diverted into mum and dad’s document processing stream.
- Usually, I open the envelope within 24 hours. Depending on how busy I think I am, I will either leave the scanned document on the table or place it in the ‘holding zone’ in my bedroom (on top of the chest of drawers).
- If the opened envelope remains on the coffee table for another 24 hours, it may disappear again into the parental document processing queue. If it manages to find its way into my room, it will stay in the ‘holding zone’ for three days.
- The paperwork is then moved into the third level of my desktop document tray.
- At tax time or during the Annual Work Filing Festival, the paperwork will be filed into its final resting place — a folder, which is carefully organised by company and chronology.
As you can see, in between arriving at my house and being properly filed, there are opportunities for documents to get lost. Amazingly, I haven’t lost any tax-relevant documents yet.
“Gee whiz,” I thought. “There is no divine punishment for lazy paperwork management. No need to reform my ways, I guess.”
But the cracks are beginning to show.
Rummaging through my paperwork for my fifth tax return, I couldn’t find three dividend statements, one contract note and who knows how many bank statements.
I’ve been creative about reconstructing my costs of acquistion and franking credit. I’ve made a few stabs at donations to tax-registered charities. I’ve hesitantly put in claims for work-related laundry expenses.
Look, I think it’ll be all right — maybe two, three months jail time, tops.