After calling around to a few numbers in the Missouri capitol Friday, Mary Cottom of the Missouri Women's Council (who administers the state's Breast Cancer Awareness Fund, an entity completely separate from the Cervical Cancer Prevention Fund) was able to connect me with one Joel Allison at the Department of Revenue. After calling around a bit himself, Allison explained to me just what had happened.

It seems that a glitch occurred when I e-filed through TurboTax, and the $4 value entered on line 45 was lost or discarded. Thus when the return was processed, the system deduced that I had overpaid and summarily (er, four months later) cut me a check for the overage.

To remedy the situation, all I have to do is return my check to Allison (with a Post-it reminding him of where I would like the money to go) at the following address:

So if anyone else out there on the Internet happens to have this problem, that's the solution, and I'd suggest calling Allison at 573-757-5855 to give him a heads up—he said I was the first person he'd heard of this happening to, but if this is a genuine glitch in the system, I fear I may not be the only one. If so, it could be a major problem for this (and perhaps other) state trust funds.

To wrap things up, Allison checked with the website folks at the DoR about the trust fund listing. In his words: "I couldn't find any reason why it wouldn't be there." A day later, the Cervical Cancer Prevention Fund was listed.

The site still claims "There is a total of seventeen trust funds eligible for contributions on Missouri’s income tax returns," which is too low by three; in addition, the entire DHSS subdomain, including the Show Me Healthy Women site, seems to be down at the moment—but hey, we're making progress, neh?