Greetings & Good Hello! It’s tax deadline day out there – and that suddenly applies to me since I have now spent a year in the United States! I believe I filed a request for extension at the end of last year but no postal response has been received overseas yet – it has been four months. Is it lost in the mail? Is the answer from the IRS lost in the mail or was there a typo on the request form, which was intensely difficult to get filled out anyhow? It turns out that one of the things you lose access to when in federal custody are federal forms – you just can not get them. In theory you can, but in practice you can not – because of broken-down institutions and uneducated, unintelligent local sheriffs’ departments.
You see, in order to get a form you would need someone to mail you the form. So far, so good – except, if that person is not an attorney, the form will be digitally delivered so you can view it only. This makes it difficult to fill out and mail back. Attorneys, it turns out, are reluctant to provide “tax forms” unless they are tax attorneys, even blank forms – since they do not want to get caught liable for anything. Thus, even though your attorney could get you a form, they likely will not. In theory there may be federal addresses which ought to be able to send you forms that ought to be recognized by facility mail processors who ought to be appropriately trained – but you would need to know these addresses by heart coming in because no-one else does. Finding a way to cut through all this bullshit can take months – it took me six months, and I was being pro-active. I have no idea what my tax situation is, but I think that my old cellmate’s ex-girlfriend maybe filed a tax extension for me. We have no way to verify.
This brings me to a topic near and dear to my heart – the online identification service used by the IRS, ID.me. I tried, once, to use the IRS’ online system, but I was unable to utilize the private third-party identification contractor ID.me. I forgot what the problem was, but it had to do with the typical requirement that Americans must fit a certain cookie-cutter lifestyle of economic consumption and behavior or be shunned from society. What I recall the most about my interactions with ID.me was that I asked for details about their identification practices and I was told that I was not allowed to know how ID.me identified me. I felt that this policy was unacceptable and simply notified the IRS that I was digitally disenfranchised and any resulting discrepancies in my tax records were on them. I had overpaid so I didn’t expect a problem – but it just goes to show how digitally backward and fundamentally disconnected the United States is – it is not a functional country. It is, from a citizen services point of view, and unlivable shithole.
Speaking of unlivable shitholes, our glorious caretakers forgot to turn on the lights all weekend long. Yep, the entire weekend left the cells in “night mode”, so almost no writing got done. The same wunderkind failed to deliver the fingernail clippers on Sunday – despite several of us asking. It gets to be a big deal after a while. We did get a long-winded preacher who taught us that Jesus liked to say “ya feel me” and “gnahwamsayn” a lot. He talked about a magic sky elf so long we were unable to clean the flies out of our showers during “rec”. It has been well over a month since Sgt C has let us exchange books at the book cart – praise the lord. We learned that Iran attacked Israel, but our guards forced us to watch several hours of VH1’s “Cheaters” instead of CNN. And, this week my motion to fire my lawyer hits the court – figured I should do that since he hasn’t contacted me for almost a month. It is sad to think that you, the taxpayer, support all of this pointless waste – and all because we do not have the right to get off mailing lists and avoid hate speech. Go USA!
Eric Charles Welton
Prisoner #94911
Columbus County Detention Center
April 15, 2024