In May 2017 I graduated from medical residency, moved states, and started my job as an attending physician. We get paid during residency, and I didn't realize it when I filled out my 2017 taxes but I totally forgot to obtain and report my W2 from my final 5 months of residency (Jan - May 2017).
The IRS really sent me a letter stating that my employer had sent them the W2, which showed about 30,000 in income from that time period, and that I owed around 2000 in taxes from it + a late fee.
This was my mistake and I am ready to just pay it off and move on. However, when I thought about it for a bit, one thing didn't make sense to me. The 5 years I was in residency I received a decent sized refund each year. I don't know as much as I should about taxes, but to me that symbolizes that each month I was actually paying more taxes on my paycheck than I should. If that is the case, wouldn't that continue to hold true for these last 5 months? And if that held true wouldn't this extra income possibly result in my refund from last year being larger than it was? I'm wondering why I suddenly owe a relatively large amount of taxes on these 5 months of income when I always received a sizable refund in the past.
Of course I could be completely misunderstanding fundamental concepts at play here. Which is why I'm making this post.
Thanks
Submitted April 19, 2019 at 11:01AM by Rocketlucco http://bit.ly/2vbJXFp
