Angela Hartley exercised incentive stock options when working for a California biotech company in 2000 and so incurred "phantom income" on stock that later declined. She is one of thousands facing the ISO-AMT pitfall that Congress so far has refused to completely fix, despite huge efforts last month to get the Senate to do the right thing. I wrote about this last week. After reading the column, she emails:

I flew to Washington DC on borrowed frequent flyer miles right before the final votes were taken. I spent two days walking the halls of Capitol Hill putting a face of reality on the proposed legislation. I received a lot of sympathy but in the end, political wrangling defeated attempts to attach this legislation to the AMT patch. If Congress believes it is a travesty for common taxpayers to pay an additional few thousand as a result of the regular AMT, how can those of us owing hundreds of thousands of dollars of AMT be ignored? We are hanging on to hope based on the dedication and support from a growing number of Representatives and Senators, but we desperately need Congress to pass legislation to end the nightmare once and for all.

I lost my home, my retirement, have paid over $500,000 to date (way over the original amount owed) and still am fighting the IRS for the remaining interest of $115,000 which grows faster than I could pay it. Meanwhile, after years of letter campaigns, meetings, and (yes) begging, we still cannot get a legislative fix or even an abeyance from IRS harassment.

More on Hartley's story here and here.