Subject: Dying Husband & Father lives long enough to protect his family and pre/overpay his ISO-AMT Taxes but not long enough to have it returned to him and or his estate!!! Comment: Dear Chairman Mack & Vice Chairman Breaux Please find below my submitted testimony to the Ways & Means Tax Simplification Hearing last Summer. Statement from Patricia Sayre To the House Ways and Means Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight Washington, D.C. June 2004 It has been four years since we paid our AMT liability, which based on our exercise of incentive stock options that was three times our income (and of course the amount of our tax liability was much greater than the value of the stocks today). The most difficult part is that we received this AMT bill after my husband was diagnosed with cancer, while on a medical leave of absence and collecting 60% of his salary from disability. We had to make arrangements for a loan, which I’m still paying on to this date. He passed away in 2001. On top of the AMT bill, the IRS charged us with interest on delayed payments while we struggled to make the payments, but the IRS did forgive the penalties for late payments. It was and still is a huge load on us financially and emotionally. Neither my husband, nor I believed that the government should have such an enormous presence in our lives to collect such a complicated, stealth tax, so that it could provide services (and control) it was never intended to provide. The difficult thing for me to understand is that we have always "paid to Caesar what was Caesar's" and didn't try to cheat the government, so it has felt like an abuse of the government's role to take an excessive amount of resources, especially charging taxes on stocks that hadn't been sold where there was no economic gain made on them to tax! Patricia Sayre San Jose, CA |