Man left stunned after receiving tax bill for $34,576,826,561.47
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: WJAC
Doing your taxes can be a nerve-wracking experience, and one man certainly got a shock when he saw his bill.
It's almost like it would be easier to just have a central agency that calculates how much tax you owe and deducts it for you, like most countries.
But this, of course, is America so you must submit them yourself and then get into legal trouble if you don't have the financial know-how of an accountant.
Barry Tangert from Pennsylvania was left sweating after submitting his taxes, only to get his bill back.
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That's because when he got his tax bill back he saw that he owed a whopping $34,576,826,561.47.
Those 47 cents are very important.
This included a penalty of just over $1.5 billion.
For a bit of context, that's more than the GDP of Iceland, which was at around $28 billion in 2023, and higher than Australia's defence budget at around $32.3 billion.
It says something when your tax bill is in the same league as national budgets.
The number on the tax bill was so large that it didn't actually fit on one line, with the last three digits being on a second line.
Speaking to WJAC TV, Barry said: “The first thought was, ‘I wish I made enough money to even owe thirty billion in taxes'."
Let's be real though, if you had enough money to owe $34 billion in taxes, you wouldn't be paying $34 billion in taxes.
Barry continued: "Then I was thinking, 'I’m going to need to drink a lot of coffee in order to work three full time jobs’ and then I’m thinking, 'Wesley Snipes doesn't have anything on me."
Eventually, he gathered himself and wondered how on earth such an error would have happened.
He said: "Finally I was thinking, 'don't they have a computer algorithm to spot an error like this and if a human looked at this why do they still have a job'."
Barry's unfortunate situation arose when his tax preparer noticed a mistake on his tax return from 2022. The tax preparer then sent in an amended return to ensure the information was all up to date and accurate.
In an odd turn of events, Barry even noticed that he had been sent a return on his taxes on the same day that he got the multi-billion dollar bill.
Well, that's all evens out then!
Barry has now reached out to the Department of Revenue in Pennsylvania, who told him they would get back to him in a few weeks.