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Hypothesis | Sep 11 2002

Let us say that you need to find an apartment as quickly as possible and that by some miracle you have succeeded in doing so, only the landlord of this apartment is requiring you to prove that you make and have made considerably more money than you do and have, despite the fact that you can afford this apartment on your current income (for you have been doing just this for several years now), and despite the fact that you have always been an excellent tenant, the kind of tenant landlords dream about, the kind of tenant who always pays his rent on time and who never hosts loud parties and who always maintains cordial if distant relations with his neighbors, even the ones he despises.

It occurs to me that if you were a “bad” person, a person who is willing under certain unfortunate circumstances to do “bad” things, you might decide to create bogus tax documents, using the handy downloadable forms provided by the IRS. For example, you could download a PDF version of last year’s 1040—not the plain version one fills in by hand, but the fancy version one completes on one’s computer. Nothing could be simpler. Although you might be surprised to discover how much work is involved in creating a bogus 1040, since after all you would want everything to add up correctly and make sense, just in case the landlord happens to note such things. Likewise, it would probably be a good idea to create some bogus supporting documents such as 1099s or W2s, or whatever seems appropriate in your case. All of which takes time to do, particularly if the forms you’ve chosen aren’t available in fill-in-able PDF versions. In such cases, it would be helpful if you had access to a typewriter, since handwritten forms are more likely to cause the landlord to pause for a moment and think, “Hey, wait a sec, these documents could easily be forged” etc.

In my case—that is, if the theoretical bad person were me—I would be in luck (or would have been in luck just one week ago, before moving to my new apartment), because my then bathroommate Michelle had a typewriter in her apartment. I know this because I sometimes heard Michelle typing as I peed. Given this, I could have easily entered Michelle’s apartment through our shared bathroom and carried her typewriter back to my apartment and typed up the necessary forms, no doubt making several infuriating mistakes while typing, since that is what one does when one is trying desperately not to.

A potential roadblock: What if the landlord has also requested a letter from your tax lawyer or accountant stating the amount you are projected to gross in 2002?

Well, it strikes me that if you had a friend of equal badness, or who possibly owed you a favor, or who, ideally, was both bad and owed you a favor, you could convince this friend to allow you to create a bogus tax preparation business for her (or him!), replete with bogus tax preparation business letterhead, which you yourself could design and produce, provided you had the requisite skills, and for which you could use a logo left over from, say, a web development job.

This logo, I should note, is not truly necessary; any letterhead, however hideous, however logo-less, would suffice, provided that it included the name and number of your friend so that the landlord could call her (or him!) with questions.

Needless to say, your friend would need to be informed of this possible phone call and thus would be advised to avoid answering her (or his!) phone until the lease has been signed. This is true even if your friend is a professional actress (or actor!) who relishes the opportunity to play the role of a helpful tax preparer.

Doubtless one could go further and get fancier—for example, by photocopying the forms several times on several photocopy machines to simulate “wornness”—however I question the need for such measures. In all likelihood the landlord will simply glance at a single line on each form and skim the bogus letter, and that as they say will be that.

You will be lucky if he even notices that the letterhead has a logo (assuming you’ve included one), let alone how well that logo works with the typeface you’ve chosen for the phone number and address, not to mention the tag line at the bottom, which I would be careful to make a few point sizes smaller and much lighter than the rest of the copy, since if it were me doing this I would be apt to make a joke here, something with private meaning but which would also seem semi-believable as a tag line.

Something like A tax for the frozen sea within you, say.