I'm the only American I know that does my own taxes. I've never paid anyone to do them. I've never use software to do it. I print the form, and fill it out with a pen. It only takes me a few minutes. I even filed my own C corporation taxes once long ago. I'm not a CPA or tax lawyer or in any line of work related to taxes.
Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
191–200 of 279 posts
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#192It's a breeze in France too. Login to the government website, verify that everything preloaded is correct, add the few things they don't know about and you're done. It's a mess in the US because Turbotax and others make money on that complexity and do lobbying to keep it that way.
France supposedly has some of the the highest tax rates in the world which seems to kind of fit some of the objections. that believe that making it easier means it will raise to France levels
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#193I'm the only American I know that does my own taxes. I've never paid anyone to do them. I've never use software to do it. I print the form, and fill it out with a pen. It only takes me a few minutes. I even filed my own C corporation taxes once long ago. I'm not a CPA or tax lawyer or in any line of work related to taxes.
Is this facilitated by keeping good financial records throughout the year or do you not care about deducting everything you can?
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't American employers also be spending a fair bit of money figuring out taxes for their employees prior to handing off the data and money to the IRS? And wouldn't financial institutions be doing something similar for their clients? The systems described by the article seem to be using the data submitted by employers and financial institutions to generate a tax return, which the tax payer verifies or adds to (in…
American employers only have to do withholding, which is extremely easy to calculate. Employees submit a W-4 listing the number of exemptions and any additional withholding. They plug it into a simple formula to calculate your withholding. The withholding is not a calculation of actual taxes owed. E.g. it doesn't even have a way to account for spousal income for married couples.
Some places I've worked allow the withholding to be a bit more accurate by specifying conditions like spousal income. The end goal is to make the refund as small as possible.
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#195The NTA (National Tax Authority, cited as the Kokuzeicho in the article) doesn't figure out your taxes for you. Your employer does, as one of the (many!) ways in which they exercise paternalistic control of your life. If you do not have an employer, you get to go through a process which is almost exactly as fun as it is in the US, modulo a modestly competent online filing application. I spent $3k this year on account…
Wouldn't American employers also be spending a fair bit of money figuring out taxes for their employees prior to handing off the data and money to the IRS? And wouldn't financial institutions be doing something similar for their clients? The systems described by the article seem to be using the data submitted by employers and financial institutions to generate a tax return, which the tax payer verifies or adds to (in…
How do you think the IRS checks your return? They already have everything they need for the vast majority of people (which includes tax payers, those who don't need to pay tax, those who don't need to even file, etc).
People with various sorts of cash businesses that don't appear at any of the classic touch points are few and far between, and probably don't report anyway.
And for the remaining people who, say, want to record an expense to offset a capital gain (like a remodel that increases the sale price of their home): they have an incentive to let the tax authorities know, since it reduces taxes. I doubt many people would do this more than once or twice in their lives unless they ran a real estate business.
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#196The NTA (National Tax Authority, cited as the Kokuzeicho in the article) doesn't figure out your taxes for you. Your employer does, as one of the (many!) ways in which they exercise paternalistic control of your life. If you do not have an employer, you get to go through a process which is almost exactly as fun as it is in the US, modulo a modestly competent online filing application. I spent $3k this year on account…
In the U.K. If you are employed, your tax is worked out for your through the Pay as You Earn system. If you are self employed you fill in the rather good self-assessment form online and your tax is calculated for you.
The UK web-based procedure for self-employed tax return is very easy to use.
I did it for years with no need for an accountant, despite my business was complicated by special circumstances (non-UK customers, tax-exempt research funds, etc).
The one year I was in credit, they wired me the money within days.
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
To give you a small example: the deduction for moving expenses[0]. If you move for work (plus some other small conditions), you can deduct those expenses from your taxable income. This can't be claimed for you automatically, you have to ask for it. To automatically file your taxes would very likely mean you miss this deduction. It's the legions of (arguably) boutique tax credits like this that crank up the complexity…
We have those - but the system is constructed to be simple. If a not insignificant part of the population is eligible for some deduction, then either a) ensure it's automatically registered or b) remove the deduction or raise tresholds until everyone can again file automatically. For example, interest rates, pensions, charities, home improvements etc are deductible and automatically deducted since e.g the bank or cha…
But you are overlooking the fundamental underlying problem. You didn't mention whether the "easy to file" tax system would be an advantage to Democrats or Republicans. Without knowing that, it is impossible to assess any piece of legislation.
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not able to find a citation for this, but I would be surprised if more than a small fraction of Americans had significant non-wage, non-financial institution investment income to report. A solution doesn't have to solve a problem for everyone to be useful.
That's just income. There is also the issue of deductions and credits, which covers many more people. The income portion of my taxes takes me about 5 minutes. Most of my time is spent on the deductions and credits portion.
Seventy percent of households take the standard deduction or have no income: https://taxfoundation.org/who-itemizes-deductions/
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#199Overlooked in this article and comments is the influence of one man -- Grover Norquist. He runs an extremely influential organization that administers a sort of purity pledge that, for most Republican candidates for Congress, is necessary to sign in order to avoid being primaried. He has decided that making taxes easier to do would make people more okay with tax increases, and so he has decreed that support for the k…
There's good evidence for this. That was part of the reason the Feds pushed employers to do withholding "on our behalf" during the 1930s. Prior to that, taxes were filed quarterly and then only a small % of people. But people actually saw how much they paid. Withholding was a clever and subtle way for us to never see part of our paycheck so then any tax return we get feels like a bonus when it was actually just an in…
>Ask the same people what they make post-tax and I'd wager less than a quarter can answer it accurately.
just sad. so many people skip basic budgeting..
Re: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. I don't have first hand experience but my understanding is that if you're employed as a salaryman in Japan then your employer will file your taxes for you. That is very different from your employer sending a form saying how much they paid you and what was already deducted for taxes.
I don't know how it's in Japan but in Austria neither the company nor the employee file taxes. There is a general tax withholding that you do as an employer for your employees but the taxes are filed automatically by the state. You can then retroactively go in and modify that by doing a "Arbeitnehmerveranlagung" where you can claim modifications to your automatic tax filings. This is a different process for when you…
This is effectively not very different than how it works for most people in the US. Yhe employer sends the government forms and funds for your estimated taxes, and at the end of the year the taxpayer files a return and gets a refund based on varying deductions.