The IRS: Setting New Standards of Efficiency

Okay, that title sounds snarky, but it isn't meant to.

Living overseas has all sorts of interesting implications when it comes to income tax season. Most countries don't require its citizens who are living outside the national borders to pay income taxes. Americans -- lucky us -- are required to file a return on "all worldwide income," no matter where earned, no matter where we live. (There are provisions in place, fortunately, to exclude a large chunk of that income from U.S. taxes, but we're still required to file a return.)

Unlike the rest of America, we weren't rushing to get our return filed this week. Six weeks ago, we filed Form 2350 with the IRS, to request a filing extension so that we can meet the overseas residency requirements that permit us to exclude our overseas income. Curious about how this works? e-mail me and I'll explain. I won't bore the rest of you.

The bottom portion of Form 2350 is a mailing label, filled out by me, with a place for the IRS to mark whether our request has been approved or not approved. While we use Shelly's parents' address for most of our mail, the mailing label, of course, contains our Manila address.

Approval from the IRS came in the mail today, in a standard Internal Revenue Service envelope. And, finally, here's the interesting part: there are apparently enough of these requests and other overseas correspondence from the IRS that the envelope entered the mail stream just a few kilometers from our house via a Manila-based mail forwarding company. There's a seven peso stamp, and a return address sticker for "Royale Logistics Phils., Inc."

I'm impressed. Rather than spending 84 cents to airmail a letter to us, the IRS spent 14 cents on domestic postage, plus the mail forwarder fee (likely just a few cents per piece) and the cost of shipping the envelopes here in bulk (certainly less than 65 cents per piece).

As a taxpayer, that's definitely a good thing.