Bureaucratic Purgatory

Just before I left for Seattle, I had to arrange for a certificate of insurance to be sent to one of the general contractors for whom the husband is doing a foundation. This is a routine matter and requires that I send a request to our insurance agent. We get a copy of the certificate. When the copy of the certificate arrived in my e-mail inbox, it was accompanied by a note saying that our work comp insurance policy had been cancelled as of April 30.

Of course, that sent me into a mild panic. We can’t have employees on a construction site with no work comp coverage. I called the work comp help line and spoke to an representative, who said that the reason the policy had been cancelled was because the quarterly payroll reports hadn’t been filed.

[We have our work comp policy through Montana State Fund. Interestingly, they don’t notify the policyholder when a policy has been cancelled. They notify the person in charge of filing the quarterly payroll reports. 🤔]

I haven’t been doing payroll—until now—because we hired that out to an accountant 25 years ago when I had small kids and was traveling more frequently. The original accountant died five or six years ago and her assistant took over the company. Inertia on my end kept the system in place. However, the assistant-now-owner obviously hasn’t been doing her job.

She never answers the business phone. I sent a couple of pointed text messages and e-mails. By the end of the day, I was able to confirm that she had filed the overdue reports. I also was able to get the policy reinstated with no lapse in coverage. Whew.

My next call was to QuickBooks to set up payroll. If I am doing it, there won’t be a risk of us losing insurance coverage or getting fined by the IRS because the person we hired is too lazy to do her job. Payroll in QBO is fairly straightforward. What has been an absolute nightmare is getting all the payroll deposit accounts under the correct business name and address. The IRS, in particular, has an annoying habit of changing our address of record at random, and good luck getting a human being on the phone who isn’t just reading from a scripted flow chart and actually knows how to fix things. The address of record with the IRS shows our correct street address and city name but the wrong zip code. I have no idea how that happened.

I spent far more time on this project than I wanted to this week. I should be ready to do payroll going forward, though.

People think I am retired with all the time in the world to do what I want. If only.

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I was hoping to cut the grass today—this was supposed to be the one day without rain all week—but I woke up to the sound of a fairly steady rain on the metal roof. Perhaps things will dry out enough by this afternoon that I can mow. The grass in the garden is almost knee high.

Our local elementary school had its plant sale on Wednesday and Thursday. For several years, we’ve had an arrangement with them to take any leftover plants at the end of their sale to sell at the homestead foundation plant sale. A group of us went to the school on Thursday evening to pick up plants and bring them to my greenhouse, which effectively doubled our tomato inventory. I spent a couple of hours out there yesterday morning getting trays organized. We have separate displays for cherry tomatoes, paste tomatoes, and slicing tomatoes at our sale, and it’s easier if the plants are sorted ahead of time.

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The robins have been very busy getting their nests ready. The porch rafters look like a condominium complex:

A mama robin was sitting on that nest on the right, but she flew away just as I snapped this pic.