We spent the whole morning in the tax office trying to sort out the problems with the employees’ annual returns. What a mess! The officer tried to make the problem our fault but once we produced our payment receipts he agreed that the fault was not from our side but on their end but he was not sure how to fix the problem. According to their records we did not make payments for the employees for as many as 4 months last year; some were only one month short. At the end of the morning he asked us to leave and let him try to figure out how to make the adjustments; which means he had no idea how to enter the amounts that had already been paid without charging penalties; the penalties are high (500 Cedis (50 dollars) for being late and 10 Cedis (2 dollars) for each day that it is not paid). That will add up in a hurry since some of the months were as far back as May 2023. We will check back in a few days to see if they get it worked out. Steve and I have to file annual returns even though we are not employees; we are volunteers and we pay taxes on our salary in the states. My 2021 account had a 620 Cedi penalty (62 dollars) because they said that I did not file mine on time. We file our annual returns and the workers all on the same day. Steve was fine and all the workers were fine. We figure that with the bulkiness of the documents they just overlooked mine and filed it after the deadline. We made a copy of the returns that we filed and we came back to the mission house and got mine but the officer said that since it did not have their official stamp there was no way they would know when it was filed. Please! Give me strength! To clear up the matter we went ahead and paid the penalty that we did not owe. Enough complaining!
This morning when we went on our walk we decided that we would walk to the back of the property and check the mango trees to see if they were getting ripe. Those trees produce a little later than the big mango tree in the front yard. The trees had lots of mangos that were not ripe but we picked up a bucket that we added to the ones we had already picked up and shared them with the ladies that work in Child Center; they were very happy with the mangoes but they will not be able to enjoy them until after sunset because they are fasting.
Steve talked to Timothy Niligrini and he was able to get a couple loads of gravel delivered to the church grounds at Kulkpeni. We are one step closer to starting on the blocks for the new rooms. He also arranged to have a water tank brought to the jobsite. He does not know when the men will start molding the blocks but hopefully it will be soon.
It was hot here again today; the high temperature was 109 degrees with a heat index of 122 degrees. Today was a few degrees cooler than it was yesterday. Yesterday’s high temp was 112 degrees with a heat index of 124 degrees. There were clouds in the sky today which is a good thing; maybe someone near us is getting rain.
Enjoy your day!
In HIS Service,
Steve and Kandie
