Ding ding! Tax time!

I started the annual Gathering of the Papers today, in preparation for The Submission to the Great IRS. I don't actually DO the taxes now, because we always end up paying, and I don't want Uncle Sam to get money (more money) from us any sooner than legally necessary. But I like to get things organized a little at a time so I don't have to dig through 16 months worth of unread magazines to find that receipt.

So today I started to gather the checking account statements together. We hardly ever write checks anymore, we mostly pay electronically, and we track the balances online too. So the statements are really only necessary to document charitable contributions, medical co-pays, and so on, and thus when an envelope comes from the Bank, we don't open it, just stow it in a handy wicker basket until the end of the year.

I started noticing several months ago that we seemed to be getting a LOT of mail from the bank. Like, daily. Usually three envelopes a day. We'd joke and call it our daily bank correspondence.

Tonight I opened it all, and within the first 4 envelopes it was plain what the situation was. We have three accounts at the Bank, a checking and two savings. Somewhere in the inner workings of the accounting office, a wrong entry was made, and starting in mid March of 2007, they have been sending us a DAILY account statement. NOT monthly like any sane place would do. I counted the checking account statements for 2007, and there are---tada---207 of them. We actually wrote fewer than 100 checks for the entire year. The mailings came to around 33 cents in postage, times three for all three accounts, times 200 for the year= around $200 in postage alone. Why not deposit $200 in our account, keep all the statements, and I'll swing by in January and scoop the lot?

Far too sensible. Tuesday I'll go to the bank and see what can be done for this year. Meanwhile, the wicker basket is straining pretty badly to hold all this vital information, but heaven forbid I pitch any of it, an audit would certainly follow, right?