My tax woes

SOMEONE please help me. The one time I’m set to earn more than usual for my editing work, I have been asked to give a receipt in exchange for my check. Which is fine, and so feeling-mature me goes to an accountant to be absorbed into the tax system where “freelancers” are seen as “self-employed.”

And then to my horror: I have been declared in debt by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), for what it calls “open cases,” from a past long gone, a business I never earned from.