Congratulations on Ignoring Your Accountant's Advice!

“This is a terrible idea.”

It won’t be the first time he says that sentence, but it will be the last time you hear him.  Filling out your detailed 1040 and its accompanying documents, you’ll make a “shooing” gesture in his general direction, one he’ll ignore, one that’ll permit you, in your head, to block out all the sounds he’s making with his dumb fat mouth.

This won’t be the first time you’ve done this.  When you first decided to buy a bouncy castle, you did it then.  When you summarily purchased a fleet of bouncy castles, you continued to do so.  When you bought a large tract of land to display and store those bouncy castles, you had to do it extra hard, especially since the taxes on that land were so high.

But now, as you lie on your taxes, as your accountant stands up and leaves the room, as you carefully determine exactly how big the fake farm you’re imagining your bouncy castles sits on will be so that you can maximize your deduction without drawing too-too much attention, you’ll wonder, for the first time, if you should actually listen to him.

The thought will skitter at the edge of your consciousness, a bleary, halting thing.  It will nearly interrupt your careful paperwork completion.  But then the dumb part of your brain, the part that once did a write-in vote for Pat Buchanan in a local election in a state he may have never even set foot in, the part of your brain that thought it was a good idea to order a wife from the Ukraine a third time, after the first one died and the second one ran away, the part of your brain that considers cheez from a spray can a froot, this part of your brain will override all others and force you to make a serious error on your paperwork.  This error will make the government owe you a considerable amount of money, make you responsible for a large amount of corn that never existed, and make your impending audit a sure thing.

If your accountant were to sign off on this tax return, he’d lose his certification.  But since he left, you won’t have to have that conversation with him.  Instead, you’ll proudly sign, declaring to the government that you prepared this return all by yourself, without any help from a grownup who, say, understands the tax code.

The part of your brain that we mentioned earlier will reward you for doing so well by playing the theme from the classic cult television series Batman on an endless loop inside your head, driving your dopamine levels way, way up.

Congratulations on Ignoring Your Accountant’s Advice!