I’m sorry for your loss.

Your reaction to managing paper after your husband’s death is a typical one. It’s hard to see processing the mail as a priority after the death of a loved one. Don’t feel alone in that response! I have a few suggestions for you that might help.

1) Since you’re 4 years behind, you need to mitigate the damage going forward. I would concentrate on the paperwork for the most recent tax year first, since that paperwork is probably still easily accessed, and then another year won’t become past due and start earning penalties.

2) I’m sure you’re overwhelmed at this point with lots of paperwork backlog, and it makes you think “I might not even have the correct paperwork,” so you feel unable to continue on the project. The truth is, you might have all the correct paperwork, and even if you don’t, you need to know what’s missing, so there’s no way around sorting through the backlog. If you’ve ignored the paper, you probably haven’t thrown away anything important, so it’s just a matter of unearthing what you need.

3) This is where a professional organizer who specializes in paper would be useful to you. It may seem like an extra expense, but you’re already spending money on penalties and interest, and those will go on forever if you don’t deal with the situation. But the cost of an organizer will stop as soon as the paper gets sorted!

An organizer can go through the paper faster than you could do it yourself. If you pay someone to help you plow through all your paper and sort it by year, then you can take that to an accountant and let them tell you if they have all they need to file the missing years. After the few years where all the life insurance payouts are filed, then you are back to regular returns that you know how to do yourself.

4) Professional organizers in your part of the globe can be found at APDO—check it out and see if you can’t get some help. Even if you only hire an organizer for a short time, it’ll be that much less you have to do alone, and an organizer can get you started on a system for sorting the paper.

5) Lastly, try not to worry. The paper is there, you just have to open all the envelopes and file folders to find it. You can most likely file a return based on estimates, and then file an amended return later if need be. An estimated return at least stops the flow of interest and penalties. Then later when you unearth everything, if you find that you need to change some numbers, file an amended return.

Hope those suggestions help! Report back on how it’s going. I’m sure others can relate to this situation!

Best of luck to you,

Gayle

I’m in the UK, so the tax return detail is different, but the reality is the same – and I have four years of tax returns outstanding.
I have been self-employed as an author/illustrator since June 2003, and for the first few years, doing my own tax return was easy peasy – I even got tax refunds from the Revenue because I didn’t actually make enough money to pay tax! LOL
But then, at the end of 2006, my husband died, and since then I have just gone into a flat spin as far as papers and tax returns are concerned.
My husband left several life insurance policies, which we benefited from, and put the money into a portfolio of investment funds (bonds), which pay a fixed amount every month, giving me and my daughters a smallish but steady income. I have not worked properly since my husband died, but I am still registered Self-Employed and am expected to submit a tax return every year. The biggest problems are (1) that the whole complication of the insurance payouts and investment funds etc just panic me totally, and I have no tiniest idea how to deal with it all regarding tax, and (b) while I have always been disorganised and untidy, in the almost-four years since my husband died I got much worse, to the extent that I barely opened any post for months on end, just unable to deal with any more decisions or pressures, I guess.
I am improving now – thank God – but I am now receiving late tax return penalties of £100 every month or two from the Revenue, and I know I have to deal with it all, but I’m afraid (after three house moves in the last three years) that even if I look at every scrap of paper in every box and pile in the house, I might not even have the correct paperwork any more, and I don’t know where that leaves me. It’s no use me employing a tax lawyer, because I tried going to one, and she said, ‘Sure I can help – just bring me the papers the Revenue ask for, and I’ll do your tax return for you.’ If it was just a question of doing the return, I’d be laughing, more or less! It’s the fact that I don’t have any idea where to find most of the necessary papers.
Any suggestions?