When I Did My Taxes This Year, the IRS Revealed a Startling Fact About Me. My Investigation Afterward Got Weird.

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7 hours ago

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If there's such a thing as an Overton window of things it's possible to change about yourself, I feel like I've been watching it gradually expand over my thirtysomething years on this Earth. It's never been easier to get a whole new face, a whole new body, or leave the country and come back no longer bald. There are official avenues for changing your name and your gender. So maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised to discover recently that when you were born is also on the list of things that aren't as set in stone as I might have thought. Did I say I've been observing this happen over my thirtysomething years? Scratch that—now that I've changed my birthdate, I'm not sure that's technically true anymore.
To be clear: I was born on the day I've always thought I was born on. But it's also true that a few weeks ago I visited a Social Security office and walked out with a piece of paper confirming my date of birth was not what it was when I walked in.
As is the case with many strange odysseys, this all started during tax season. After using an accountant for my entire adult life, this year I let myself be convinced that, given that I have one job and negligible freelance income, I was overpaying for bespoke service when TurboTax would suffice. Unfortunately, my experience of using the software felt spiritually cursed from the second it began. Maybe I was just being a baby—uploading PDFs really isn't so hard—or maybe my intuition detected that something was amiss. Whatever the case, I wasn't exactly surprised when my taxes were rejected, both federal and state. Of course they were. But I was surprised with the stated reason: My birthdate didn't match what the Internal Revenue Service had on file.
At first, I figured I must have entered my own birthdate wrong, typical dumb me. But no, I input the date that I had always known to be my birthday, and it was resulting in a big, fat rejection.
The TurboTax gurus counseled me that my only recourse was to file my taxes by mail, which made me nervous considering New York state makes a big to-do of telling you it is somehow illegal not to file electronically if you did your taxes using software. Also, I'd have to call the Social Security Administration to straighten out the birthday issue if I didn't want this to happen again next year. This alone sounded onerous: This was around the time I'd read the news that Elon Musk was gunning to shut down phone services at the SSA altogether. The first time I called, the lines were so busy I don't even remember if waiting was an option; a recording informed me that call volume slowed down later in the month. It was a few weeks before I tried again.
When I got through, a kind woman listened to me describe my problem and then asked a series of questions (my full name, mother's maiden name, father's name, and the city where I was born) that led me to believe that any minute now, we'd get to the bottom of this. Then she hesitated—or maybe I was just impatient—so, trying to move things along, I asked: Well, is it wrong? What birthday do they have down for me? That's when she told me she couldn't actually tell me. At this point the conversation got surreal. I'm not sure how else to describe what it feels like for a government employee to tell you that they can't tell you when your own birthday is. Because she couldn't confirm to me what date they had on file, I'd have to make an in-person appointment, and I might get there and discover that they had the right date on file all along. Reading between the lines, I got the sense that the SSA did not agree with me about when my birthday was: The woman asked if I had a birth certificate. I did, but out of curiosity, I asked what would happen if I didn't. In that case, she told me, I wouldn't be able to change my birthdate. And I would just be stuck with a birthday the government was withholding from me, forever? How would people know when to send me birthday cards? How would Sephora know when it was time for my annual Beauty Insider gift? It was now my mission to convince the government that they were committing identity fraud, not me.
I also had to know if there were other birthday refugees like me. I reached out to Tom O'Saben, the director of tax content and government relations at the National Association of Tax Professionals, to see what he made of this. 'I'll be honest with you, in 35 years of doing tax returns and being an enrolled agent for most of that time, I have never run into this situation,' O'Saben told me. He explained that the main way the IRS verifies people's identities is by matching the first four letters of their last name to their Social Security number. 'Probably the No. 1 reason returns fail is when the first four letters of the last name don't match what the Social Security system has because someone got married and they assumed their spouse's last name, but they didn't tell Social Security,' he said. O'Saben asked me if I happened to have gotten married in the past year, or if there might have been some other life event, like ceasing to be a dependent on my parents' taxes, that had triggered this. But nope, I'm not married, and I have been paying taxes for years. Tax returns don't actually ask for your birthdate, O'Saben pointed out, and it's true—if you look for your birthdate on the forms, you won't find it. But tax software does ask for it, and it had flagged mine.
In the weeks between that call and the May morning I walked into a Social Security office in New York for my appointment, my imagination invented endless explanations for the discrepancy. How had it never come up before? I paid taxes every year; I held jobs, bank accounts, credit cards. How long had it been wrong? Was I secretly adopted? Did my parents steal me from my real family and cover it up? This is a theory I would have given more consideration to if I didn't look so obviously related to my parents. It seemed unlikely they had stolen a baby who had then grown up to look like a perfect blend of both of them, though I guess not impossible.
I happened to be watching Good American Family during these weeks, a TV show on Hulu based on the true story of an orphan named Natalia Grace who was born with a rare form of dwarfism. When the family that adopts Natalia first meets her, they think she's 8, but they become convinced she's an adult posing as a child and get her age legally changed to 22, and a confusing saga ensues. Was there any chance my age was actually off by 16 years? I was pretty sure I was the age I always thought I was, but I couldn't be completely certain. I had obviously been there when I was born, but due to the unavoidable fact that I was a baby at the time, I had to concede I wasn't a reliable witness. Were they going to have to slice me open and count my rings?
The day before my appointment, my boyfriend and I got to talking about how I hoped it would go. It would be cool if the birthdate Social Security had was way off, like not even in the right year, I offered. He thought that was too optimistic; he predicted I was going to get there and they weren't going to have the wrong date at all. He ended up being right that the overall experience was pretty mundane, a lot like going to the DMV. But at the same time, it was monumental, because I discovered they did indeed have the wrong birthdate—not dramatically wrong, not decades off, but wrong nonetheless, apparently for my whole life.
They had my birthday down as Oct. 13 rather than Sept. 13, in the correct year. I don't know if they would have volunteered the actual date if I hadn't asked—that's how little it mattered on their end. To them, this was a simple clerical error; only I considered it an existential dilemma that the government erroneously had me down as a Libra! How could this have happened, I asked, and why did it only come to light now? The employee helping me was unfazed: It was a long time ago, before electronic records. I handed over my birth certificate and driver's license, and the whole thing took no more than a few minutes to fix.
Even though O'Saben, a veteran tax preparer, had never encountered a situation like mine before, I've come to understand that it happens. This explains why I was able to find multiple examples of people turning to online forums like Reddit for advice on similar situations. Though I came across the occasional anecdote of someone encountering friction (including this person, who amusingly claimed to be resigned to living with the wrong Social Security birthdate for the rest of their life), most fixed the situation with minimal fuss. So maybe we aren't so special. But the vast majority of people in the world can't say they changed their birthdate, and we can, so I'm going to keep bragging about it, at least until next tax season. I have two birthdays between now and then, and I plan on celebrating them both.