71–80 of 438 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think of it more as "The IRS has prepared this return for you. Look at it. If it's what you expect, you have nothing else to do other than send a check if you owe or a bank account for your refund. If you have extra information (more income, deductions, etc) - then you are free to fill out your own forms. As such, 60-70% of the population would have nothing to do. People with multiple part time jobs would be fine. Th…
What happens when the IRS gets it wrong and the impoverished recipient has nobody to review it for them? (Still I suppose that may be an improvement over the status quo)
That said I'm sure US congress could find some interesting way to involve for profit companies in the process that makes everyone even more miserable than the current system.
13 million in lobbying over five years to prevent more efficient tax filing for an entire nation and protect your business model. Sounds like an amazing deal for a company with 5 billion in revenue. I'm consistently amazed at just how little money it takes to buy off the government effectively.
It is not that simple and there are deeper issues. If buying out politicians was easy Google and Amazon would have easily raised H1B cap by now. Just like in immigration there are multiple forces at play in taxation too. The powerful anti-tax group (which I support) is against this simplification problem. We believe making it simple would also make it simple to raise taxes and people will not realise how much money t…
In other words you think people are too dumb to do the math, but yet are smart enough to make intelligent protests against taxes when they have to write a check?
As a rule of thumb I would not trust IRS to do my taxes but I am happy if they send me a draft and I have to just sign or make corrections.
That is how it works in Spain and Sweden. But, in the end, the tax office will randomly select people and check their tax applications. If you did something wrong they will send a correction so you pay the difference plus an interest rate. But even then you can send allegations to justify your original tax application. Only if they reject the allegations you need to pay the difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just that, anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist has outsized interest on the right and he gets republicans to sign a pledge to not raise taxes, and if they violate the pledge Norquist raises money and campaigns against them. The problem is, the pledge also requires signees also do not support legislation to make paying taxes easier. The radical anti-tax groups are so anti-tax that they see making it easier to pay…
Where do you see that? https://s3.amazonaws.com/atrfiles/files/files/Federal%20Pled... EDIT: OK, found this https://www.atr.org/taxpayer-advocates-issue-joint-free-file... https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/ba148cd5babdda39... https://s3.amazonaws.com/atrfiles/files/files/041111lt-wycoa...
They already do prepare your taxes. They just make you do the same work twice.
If they do, they are terrible at it. I get 'corrections' from the IRS about once a year to previous returns, all of which are basically them making an error and then sending me a bill. Not only do I have to waste time preparing my taxes, but I have to waste additional time disputing their BS 'corrections'.
“Your taxes” is such an overloaded term that it’s almost comical to refer to it as if it means the same thing for everyone. There is basically one straight-forward case where the IRS preparing taxes makes sense: that of full time employees whose only income is from their job which issues W2s. For everyone else — which includes: - People working multiple part time jobs - People with non-standard investment portfolios…
I live in Denmark, and all of the above use cases are automatically calculated by our tax auth..
My most complex tax-filing was:
- Full-time job
- Extra "non-job" salary (board membership)
- Investment income from two different providers
- Expenses for multiple bank loans and mortage, and external credit card companies
- Three different companies (LLCs) that I own
All of that info send to the IRS (by law) from all provider.
My time for tax-filing 10 minutes to look it through (and do nothing as it was correct).
This year I had 1 change to the taxes. The interest from a small collective loan for our home-owners association was not automatically filed, and I had to enter that by hand... Took 5 minutes..
Small note, my three companies also had my time spent doing tax stuff, but that is by law required of the LLCs and the companies have a (shared) accoutant doing that..
Other note. Even royalties (for books, music etc) are correctly calculated by the danish IRS due to the requirements of posting from the companies doing payouts..
tl;dr: The requirements of the payer and all financial institutes to file to the IRS is extremely effective...
I'm annoyed that there is no simple system for the IRS to tell me what I owe, and let me pay or dispute. Instead, we play this game where the IRS provides a bunch of complicated documents, I guess which ones to fill out and submit, then wait 3 years to see if I was randomly chosen to see if I was correct. So it's very easy to make a mistake for dozens of years, then suddenly be penalized at random. It's the worst kin…
13 million in lobbying over five years to prevent more efficient tax filing for an entire nation and protect your business model. Sounds like an amazing deal for a company with 5 billion in revenue. I'm consistently amazed at just how little money it takes to buy off the government effectively.
It's not just that, anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist has outsized interest on the right and he gets republicans to sign a pledge to not raise taxes, and if they violate the pledge Norquist raises money and campaigns against them. The problem is, the pledge also requires signees also do not support legislation to make paying taxes easier. The radical anti-tax groups are so anti-tax that they see making it easier to pay…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lower taxes? In France the bracket for a family for €104,120 to €279,132 is only 30%. Sure if you live in Oaklahoma you might pay less than that but CA/NY state taxes plus property taxes, plus fewer investment tax free options, I think US taxes are now similar or higher. Ie 28% federal + 10% state + 10% property taxes equals nearly 50%. Sure sales tax is lower. Plus - you still have to pay for your medical care, and…
In the UK you don't pay 45% until 150,000 and only 45% on any amount over 150,000 as it's tiered.
You pay in tax bracket A up to $X, then the next tier is taxed at tax bracket B, and so on, and so on.