Jeff's Not Having a Great Week/Month/Season

It's tax season. I shouldn't have to say any more than that. But I will.

No one likes filing taxes. But to file multiple times is painful. Every year, such a pain.
How many different taxes do I file? Five - count them, five.
There are the 2 personal returns, one each to the Czech Republic and the US.
Then we our 2 corporate returns* to the Czech Republic and US.
* Yes, we maintain a shell corporation (LLC in the US, an s.r.o. here). We had to create an s.r.o. to permit buying property as non-EU citizens. Seems some laws were made just to complicate the American dream when an American lives elsewhere.

How is Czech tax reporting? Swift (31st March deadline) and relatively painless. Speaking positively, it's surprisingly straightforward. That said, paying is paying, which is no fun, no matter how straightforward it is.
Uncle Sam is not so swift. We have until June 15th to report all income, bank accounts and livelihood from abroad. How kind of Uncle Sam. And straightforward, Uncle Sam is not, but many reading this already know that.

If you're still counting, remember I said five tax filings? The fifth? - the f'ing FBAR form.
The FBAR is a US form, for Americans to detail all banking and investing balances for all foreign accounts. This means, if you have money in a foreign bank, you file the FBAR.
For the mega-rich, the form is meant to investigate offshore accounts, i.e. tax havens. Penalties are some of the harshest in tax code, starting with 5 years jail and/or $250,000 fines.
But for the average American expat, this form is unjust, raising suspicions where there needn't be. Is the FBAR really mandatory? Apparently Obama thinks so. The FBAR has been in the news a lot lately. So, yeah, we file this one, too.

Oh, and as if tax forms aren't enough, earlier this week Jeff lost all data on a 1TB hard drive (that's one thousand GB). Hardware fickleness turned into data corruption, which turned into -*poof*- gone. Several hundred DVDs worth of files are "there" but unreadable. All I can do is shrug and turn on the radio.

All in all, not a good time lately.