Google's Paris HQ raided in tax probe

Ok, I'm not exactly sure what we're really disputing here. To clarify, I was just agreeing with the sentiment of GP's claim that "every cup of coffee you've ever had in your life was at a lower temperature than what McDonald's was serving up". You're right that as a literal statement it is probably not true.

The real point is whether McDonald's coffee was being served at an unreasonably hot temperature. Based on what I saw in the movie, and read on the Consumer Attorney's of California website, and based on my experience with current/post-lawsuit McDonald's coffee temperatures (which I still find exceedingly hot), I find it entirely believable that the coffee was served at an unreasonably hot temperature.

More context:

> Mrs. Liebeck’s injuries were far from frivolous. She was wearing sweatpants that absorbed the coffee and kept it against her skin. She suffered third-degree burns (the most serious kind) and required skin grafts on her inner thighs and elsewhere.

Liebeck’s case was far from an isolated event. McDonald’s had received more than 700 previous reports of injury from its coffee, including reports of third-degree burns, and had paid settlements in some cases.

Mrs. Liebeck offered to settle the case for $20,000 to cover her medical expenses and lost income. But McDonald’s never offered more than $800, so the case went to trial. The jury found Mrs. Liebeck to be partially at fault for her injuries, reducing the compensation for her injuries accordingly. But the jury’s punitive damages award made headlines — upset by McDonald’s unwillingness to correct a policy despite hundreds of people suffering injuries, they awarded Liebeck the equivalent of two days’ worth of revenue from coffee sales for the restaurant chain.

The UK is clearly an outlier. They also drive on the wrong side of the road and have a strange relationship to the metric system :D

For sure, I was just trying to be forceful in my (same) opinion. It's a good example and good common sense.

This is very different for Americans with different income levels. If you earned less than $100,000 and "[y]ou had only wages, salaries, tips, taxable scholarship or fellowship grants, unemployment compensation, or Alaska Permanent Fund dividends, and your taxable interest was not over $1,500", you can use Federal form 1040EZ, which is one side of one page and asks only about 10 questions, none of which call for the tax filer to make choices.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040ez.pdf

With rare exceptions (mostly related to immigration or expatriation, self-employment or owning a business, or suffering calamities), complicated calculations and the risk of audit apply to itemized deductions, which is when filers declare that some of their income should not be taxes because they did something, spent money on something, or suffered a problem that the government recognizes as reducing tax liability. Examples of this include business expenses, paying some foreign or local taxes, paying interest on a home loan (probably the most common!), some medical or educational expenses, or making donations to a qualified charity.

Itemized deductions have a big role in economic decisions in the U.S. and are pretty well-known in culture, but most people don't use them at all, and usually only the most well-off people use them consistently. This is not necessarily just because the well-off people are more aware of the benefits of itemization or have more access to professional tax advice, but also because poorer people may often not be able to benefit from itemization at all, by not having spent enough money on relevant kinds of stuff.

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43012.pdf

A simple summary is that only about 1/3 of all American tax filers claim itemized deductions, and higher-income people use them dramatically more often than lower-income people (mostly because they're more likely to own their own homes or incur unreimbursed business expenses, but also for various other reasons).

The risk of a personal income tax audit is primarily that the government will decide to challenge a filer's entitlement to claim particular deductions, and then demand to see evidence of their legitimacy (which might be receipts or paperwork showing that certain expenses were actually incurred and appear to be related to the purpose claimed on the tax return). For example, if you said that you gave $15,000 to charity or that you spent $10,000 on travel for your consulting business, the IRS might ask for documentation during an audit to prove that these things really happened.

While I don't mean to minimize the pain or intrusiveness of a tax audit and HN readers may be at real risk of experiencing one, I think most Americans' tax position is relatively simple for them to determine and gives no reason for an audit, because it's based only on information like W2 wage statements that other parties have already reported to the IRS!

(Though I was surprised to see that the IRS says the average paperwork burden for form 1040EZ is 5 hours, which is about 5 times as long as I would have guessed and seems to count against my account of the situation. I'm also oversimplifying because people who support a spouse or children will have to file a different, more complicated form in order to get tax benefits from that, which is true of lots of Americans who don't own a home. At the same time, they won't necessarily have to do many extra calculations or provide much extra documentation related to the people they're supporting.)