Mile
Zero

Today is tax day, as you probably know. I knew that it would bite me hard, but hopefully--seeing as how I'm no longer working full-time at the World Bank--I can look forward to a much simpler, more withheld tax experience in the future.

Yesterday I called the tax office at the Bank just to check on something. "I've heard that you pay half my self-employment tax," I said. "Is that true?" "Not for you," the accountant said. "We only pay that for term and open-ended employees." It is always nice to have a reminder that even while I worked 40+ hours a week for the Bank, on paper I was working for myself--and now I get to pay for it.

I suspect that the reason that the Bank decides to just drop the tax burden on its low-level employees is that, as I've noted before, most employees of the World Bank do not pay taxes, since they're working outside their home countries for an international organization. Perhaps it's just a sense of fairness: why do paperwork for Americans when the rest of the staff needs no such help? The fact that our situations really are dissimilar does not seem to have entered the equation.

Still, I don't particularly want to gripe about how the Bank treats its employees, even the American ones, because they did pay me very well. I suppose that's worth some hassle every quarter. It could be worse: for some time, employees living elsewhere were paid on fixed salaries in dollars, which was not terribly comfortable when the currency began to fall relative to the Euro. Or at least, that's what I told myself when I sat down every few months to write out what seems like a mammoth check for my "self-employed" day job.

I have 26 days of leave accumulated over my soon-to-end two-year extended term at the Bank. 26 days--that's just slightly more than five work-weeks. And when I transition to a temporary short-term contract next week, the Bank will buy that leave back. Thoughts:

1. I am going to miss the benefits when I leave this job. I may complain about the tax hassle, but you can't beat the health care (even if I didn't use it) and the vacation time (even if I didn't take it).
2. Seriously, 26 days? I have got to get out more. Look, it's not that I'm a workaholic. I just like what I do. Really.
3. When the check does arrive, it's going to be manna from heaven. I can finally get that ING savings account I've always wanted. Because honestly, it's barely worth it with a brick-and-mortar bank anymore. Bank of America's savings accounts only earn 0.2% a year. I made $3.48 in interest for 2006. And people wonder why most Americans don't save.

I used to have a girlfriend who was a very smart accountant for Freddie Mac. Getting her masters, she'd made a few connections at big institutions around the area. When I first told her that I was considering working for the World Bank after a post-college job fell through, she mentioned a friend who worked here and really enjoyed it. And, she said, because the Bank is an international organization you don't have to pay taxes.

Ha! The folly of youth! We forgot to factor in that the friend in question was Chinese, a foreign national. Of course she didn't pay taxes--not here, at least. Oh treacherous jump to conclusions, you have foiled me again!

The truth is that Bank employees pay taxes, just like every other American citizen. The difference, as I have found while trudging through the paperwork and misinformation, is that we have to pay it ourselves. International organizations (I'm told IBM shares this designation) don't withold taxes for you. As a result, I've had to drop a chunk of cash into a savings account every paycheck, and every quarter I pay it as an estimated tax payment. The grand wits at the IRS make it especially interesting by changing the schedule so that one "quarter" is four months long, and the next is two. When I feel charitable, I recognize that this is to reconcile the April 15th due day for all taxes with the January end of the fiscal year, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

The quarterly payment includes my Social Security, theoretically. I say theoretically, because when the time comes for me to actually file the 1040 all of this will show up under a self-employment tax, even though I'm not self employed. I'm not really clear on why, when DC is surely filled with international organizations, those who are employed by them are partially self-employed for tax purposes, but I am not an accountant. I accept it and move on. Moral of the story: The World Bank is a really bad tax shelter.

Next time, I'll try to write about how the Bank reflects its constituency. It's much more important than whining about my taxes, I promise.

I just wrote a check to the IRS for $2,222.

It's that time again: tax time at the Bank. Which, as an international organization, doesn't pay taxes and doesn't withhold my Social Security or Medicare. No, I get to pay those personally using the Self-Employment schedule. And TurboTax, perhaps reasonably assuming that most of its customers are not employees of international organizations, doesn't like to fill out the Schedule SE without accompanying business income.

The long and the short of it is that I'm paying for the software to submit quickly and without a printer, since I'm going to have to fill out the forms manually anyway. It's probably still worth the $35 anyway, but what a pain. They don't tell you when you sign the contract to basically kiss an extra grand goodbye for added taxes.