Perhaps the arrears are from prior years and include interest and penalties? The IRS will give a payment plan and likely forgive the underreporting penalty. If this is the first year she’s required to report quarterly income, there is no penalty. Perhaps she’s in arrears because of actions by her spouse.
Perhaps your father’s tax consultant and/or lawyer can be helpful figuring out her situation so you, sister and dad can decide how to go forward. From what you’ve said about her, how helpful she’s been, I think it’s worth getting all the facts.
Has anybody heard of Superpatch? Supposedly no meds, just countour/ridges. An older friend uses them (and sells them… I assume some kind of Amway-like scheme). Sounds scammy to me. But I just said, “I’m glad you found something that works for you”. She was not at all pushy when I showed zero interest for self - yay.
There’s no way it’s legal for that caregiver to be a 1099 contractor. The IRS is bound to catch up to the agency. I’d verify everything she is telling you.
We saw my MIL/FIL for a brief visit that went pretty well but included a couple alarming bits of info. MIL got lost at the mall after FIL dropped her off. A week or so later FIL picked up their spare car at the garage, so MIL was to drive their car back, following him.
She got lost, maybe 1 mile from their house. Pulled off the road, couldn’t make her phone work, eventually FIL came looking for her and they got home. FIL’s take on all that is that they can’t move from their home because nothing else is familiar enough, but he has to find a smaller house for her to buy when he dies. But they have “2 or 3 years” to plan. They are 84 and 85.
MIL was talking to me about my kids, got excited that she had a photo of my youngest, went to get it and showed me. I said, oh, this is BIL as a toddler, not my kid. She was very sure despite it very obviously not being the case. I felt bad for her, DH talked her down from that one. Onward we go, nothing to be done.
It’s tough when elders start getting lost. Dad lost mom AND the car one weekend. My brother still didn’t want to be the “bad guy” and tell him he couldn’t drive. Fortunately he told dad the CCRC told him dad couldn’t drive if he was going to live in CCRC, so he stopped driving and they let all of us drive them.
Getting lost was the hard line in the sand for my mom’s neurologist on when to stop driving. Thankfully my father was in agreement and we took the keys away and my dad sold the car the very next day.
Some states allow you to report drivers anonymously. NY state has a form, which includes a question about why you think they are impaired. Alternatively (or additionally!) can you relay your concerns to their doctor so s/he can speak with them?
No one wants to deal with this but my litmus test was asking myself how I would feel if my mother killed a child while driving, and I had known how impaired she was. How would I feel, knowing I could have stopped her, but didn’t.
This isn’t really directed at you @greenbutton I had this exact conversation with my brother, who didn’t want to deal with the driving issue.
My mom’s neurologist asked my mom and I the same question. And more pointedly said, the child you kill could be your granddaughter. My mom literally reached into her purse and handed me her keys. We were very lucky that she didn’t fight us. I have other friends who had to disable the car to get their parents to stop driving.
The big thing was my commitment to my mom to drive her where she needed to go. She needed to know that she wasn’t going to be “stuck in the house”. It was a lot on my shoulders since D was young at the time. I went three days/week to take her to run errands, the mall, or where ever she wanted to go. And most of the time I’d go back and pick her up to come with us to all the after school running around which she really enjoyed. After a few years, they got a caregiver for a few hours for the days I wasn’t there and she’d go out with my mom or friends would take her.
Obviously not a solution for out of town family though.
We feel blessed that when my late mom hit 90 and her car needed an extremely expensive repair, she gave it up willingly—”after all, I have YOU to drive me places, you’re retired!!!” she told me.
My father stopped driving in his early 90s. But oh, how reluctant he was to sell the lovely Lexus convertible that he bought used here in CO (for his 80th birthday, when out here for CO_kid’s graduation… drove it home with his wife). In the last few years, it spent most of the time in the garage. A kindly neighbor used to help him if battery died, tire pressure went low… then they’d go for a spin, stop for ice cream. It was definitely an indulgence to keep paying for upkeep and insurance, but it was what helped him keep feeling young. Finally sold it about 2 years ago, age 96. I was relieved because there are other favors needed now from those kindly neighbors, and his wife can no longer do the dogsitting that was a bit of a barter system.
Ha ha MY mother walked half a mile (from her house to mine) with a knee that was due to be replaced, found the car keys we thought we hid, took her car for a joy ride, and thought she parked it the way she found it (she did not, it was half on the lawn). It was like dealing with a rebellious teenager at that stage.
And when NY State notified her that her license was permanently revoked, she fully intended to keep driving anyway. We ended up disconnecting the battery.
After my dad was told he could no longer drive, one day we were visiting and he tricked ds2 into retrieving the hidden key that he no longer could access. It was somewhere under the truck near the tailpipe. Ds2 felt SO BAD that he’d been tricked like that. My dad didn’t drive it as ds2 told us what happened and we took those keys, too.
Ds2 still drives his grandfather’s truck to this day.
We had to disconnect the alternator on my Dad’s car. He then moved to an obsession (vascular dementia is the worst) with his O2 not working at 2 am, when he would wake up my mom, bully her into getting them into her car in the garage, and then plugging the O2 pump into the power of the car. Once he made her drive to the gas station so they wouldn’t run out of gas. Once she couldn’t get the garage door open (power outage) so they ran the car in the closed garage, omg. At that point, Local Sibling cut the wires on the garage door opener, locked the garage, and we just kept telling them it was a mysterious malfunction until we got a whole house generator installed. It is rough, yes.
Our state has no means to remove a license. My MIL actually just had hers renewed last month, you just have to update the photo. We don’t know the name of any of their doctors and while doctors can report to a database for the DMV, the DMV only spot checks names in there. Absolutely far from ideal.
I convinced my mom that my D22 needed a car and she agreed to give hers if I would drive her as needed (took several months of sighs, what are we going to do’s? If only she could use your car at least sometimes, etc., before she “came up” with a solution that I’d been leading her toward for months). Then she failed the eye test on her drivers license renewal. It was the very last thing - the peripheral vision on the last eye tested - and it does make me wonder if they just do that and hope the 90 year old gives up at that point. Especially as it takes 6 months to get an eye appointment around here (currently scheduled for June so she won’t be driving before then if ever). One question - what do you all do for ID if the parent has no license? Don’t want to pay to renew her passport (which is way expired at this point). I guess there’s a non-driver’s license ID they can get?
