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.