Tax Implications
The letter from the IRS came in a manila envelope on a Tuesday in the first week of July. It was a Notice CP2000, which I know because Terry had, prophetically, two months earlier, walked me through what a Notice CP2000 would look like if one were to come, so that I would not open it and think I was being arrested. I still thought I was being arrested. The envelope had the look manila envelopes from federal agencies have, which is a look designed, by a committee at some point in the late 1970s, to produce exactly the small interior rearrangement I experienced in my kitchen at ten-fifteen that morning.
The essence of the letter was that a third-party payment processor — that is, PayPal — had filed a 1099-K on my behalf, reporting that I had received approximately one hundred and forty-two thousand dollars in payments during the preceding calendar year, and that this figure did not match what had been reported on my tax return, which was, specifically, nothing, because I had filed in March as a retired librarian with a pension and a small amount of interest income and had not, at that point, fully understood that PayPal had been receiving money the entire time I had been pretending it wasn't.
I called Terry. Terry did not say *I told you so,* because Terry is a professional, but Terry made a very small sound in the back of his throat that communicated, more economically than