For students who participated in the visa programme last year, it is worth noting that this is now the time to file your tax return with the US Internal Revenue Service. This is one of the great introductions to bureaucracy and will be something about which you can boast to your children when you are old.
Basically, you should by now have received from your employer(s) in the US a statement of tax paid, assuming, of course, that you paid tax and participated in the programme without defrauding Uncle Sam of his due.
You should now apply to the US embassy for the 1995 1040NR-EZ/1040NR package. This is a tear jerkingly daunting slab of paperwork with 100 pages and many, many forms which you may fill out if you choose.
Ignore the section which details the amount of time which should be spent filling, out the form. According to, the IRS, a decent human being should have spent one, hour and 19 minutes on record keeping, 48 minutes learning about the law, one hour 30 minutes preparing the form and 35 minutes copying, assembling and sending the form to the IRS. This adds up to, em, four hours and 12 minutes, which is too long. If you spend four hours and 12 minutes on this, your friends will laugh at you and small children will mock you in the streets.
Instead, simply turn to P3, on which you will find form, 1040NR-EZ. The EZ means, that it is EZ-er (I know, but they're Americans) to fill out than form 1040NR, which is a development to be welcomed since Irish applicants for tax refunds invariably managed to get their sums wrong on 1040NR.
Getting the sums wrong on 1040NR is not a tragedy but it will lead the Internal Revenue people in Philadelphia to send you a letter advising you that you are, in fact, a bit dim and that this 66 section form was really a piece of cake if you read the six pages of instructions that came with it.
When your form is filled out, simply pop it in the preaddressed envelope and the IRS will do the rest. They are, to their credit, very efficient and will send a refund cheque winging back to you in a remarkably short space of time. And remember they got Al Capone for tax evasion, so be honest.
