Angelika Besides the tedious "Perl Book" story, a second not-so-thrilling topic has demanded quite a few night shifts: namely, filing our American tax return. First of all, I want to clear up some misconceptions by Germans that seem impossible to eradicate: Firstly, you do pay taxes in America, and they are not necessarily lower than in Germany. However, it is true that you pay less in social security contributions (retirement insurance, health insurance, unemployment insurance), but it should be considered what price Americans have to pay for this, namely that millions are uninsured and that unemployment and social security are rather a joke, not providing sufficient security in emergencies.

Secondly, filling out the American tax return is at least as complicated as the German one, contrary to the belief that everything here is simpler and less bureaucratic. With the forms, you get the feeling that the designer won the competition on "How to express a matter as complicated as possible so that no one understands it anymore" with flying colors. It's really maddening. In these situations, I was always on the verge of throwing all the tax books and documents out the window. This year, I had the honorable task of filling out the documents. Michael had a good excuse because of his book (Next year, I'll write a book too!). Moreover, he enticed me with the argument that the daughter of a tax advisor should be able to handle this with ease and that I am much more thorough than he is, etc., etc. I didn't even know what qualities I had.

So, I bit the bullet, read all the tax books, and spent nights brooding over the forms. You might now want to know why we, as Germans, are paying taxes in America at all. This is actually a matter that is quite fairly regulated. If you are in the country for more than 183 days, you have to tax your worldwide income in America (including Michael's German book earnings). The same goes for an American living in Germany for 183 days; they have to tax everything in Germany. This regulation seems to have been invented by someone with common sense. You might also wonder why we didn't just have an American tax advisor do our tax return. We would have loved to, and after all, they want to make some money too. But our German friends who also live here strongly advised against it because none of them can handle foreign income from Germany to be taxed in the U.S.

It's also funny that every American and Resident Alien (that's what we're called in bureaucratic English; it reminds me a lot of E.T., and often you do feel like an alien from another planet) has to submit their tax return by April 15th. Since most Americans have quite a horror of tax returns (I understand that well), many follow the strategy of postponing this unpleasant topic as long as possible. So, shortly before the 15th, you see people in the subway filling out their forms on their knees, many post offices are open until midnight on the 15th, as are the tax advisor offices, for last minute submissions. There are often parties where people celebrate successful submitting their tax return, and our American friend Anne told us that on the first weekend after the 15th, all the restaurants are full because people finally have time to go out again. What's also different here in the U.S. compared to Germany is that you don't have to send in receipts, and only 5% of tax returns are audited. 5% is, of course, vanishingly small, and so everyone hopes that their return won't be audited and that they won't end up in the grueling audit. The only problem is, if you do get audited, you're in for it, as everything is thoroughly checked, and the authorities can trace back previous submissions, up to three years. The more complicated your tax situation is, the more likely you are to be audited. So, we have pretty good chances, which only led Michael to remark: "You have to experience everything once." Well, I don't know, I can certainly do without that.

Regarding the receipts issue, I've heard some of the most adventurous stories here. Since it's relatively unlikely to be audited, many Americans claim deductions for things they don't actually have receipts for. However, during an audit, you have to present these receipts. So, people come up with stories that they lost their receipts in a house fire, or a popular excuse in California after the big earthquake in 1989 was that everything was lost due to this natural disaster. It's only embarrassing when people mix up the dates and claim they have no receipts for things that happened long after the earthquake, which allegedly happened in many cases.

After Michael and I were already firmly convinced that nothing could surpass the bureaucracy regarding American taxes, the publisher for whom Michael is writing the aforementioned book sent us a form with the melodious name "Application for the Issuance of a Certificate of Exemption for Royalties and Similar Payments under the Double Taxation Agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America." This means we have to fill out this form and send it to the Federal Office of Finance in Germany so that we don't have to pay taxes twice, in both Germany and America. The fact that there is already an agreement between the two countries that clearly regulates this situation (see the 183-day rule) seems not to have reached the relevant authorities, and so they produce unnecessary piles of paperwork, driving little Angelika and Michael to the brink of madness. The ultimate joke is that, of course, you also need a confirmation from the American tax office proving that we are taxable here. The friendly German text informs you of this (to understand which, you need a degree in public administration). After reading it several times, Michael and I finally understood that we needed to fill out U.S. tax form 6166, which you get from the American IRS. So Michael called there at seven in the evening and actually reached someone, which is a clear difference from the German authorities. The friendly lady on the other end of the line then informed him that this form has not existed for five years, but she could gladly send us the information sheet on this topic with the number 686. I probably don't need to mention that in such situations, one might sometimes feel like biting the telephone receiver out of frustration. It really makes you wonder whether buzzwords like "globalization" and "flexibility" can be taken seriously or if it's really about encouraging people to stay in their own country. Or as the clerk at the Techniker Krankenkasse (our German health insurance) so nicely put it before we moved to America and I had some questions on the implications: "You don't have to go abroad!"

If you've lost the thread during the whole description and can't see through it anymore, take comfort in the fact that we felt and feel the same way.

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• More topics you might be interested in:

  	Social Services in California
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