141–150 of 277 posts
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"ask"
It definitely is an ask. If you can’t pay it you can often negotiate an amount you can pay. And they even let you pay over time.
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> if we disagree we may ask you to pay more The opposite can happen, too. The last time they disagreed with me on how much tax I should have paid, they mailed me a check for the difference.
Did they give you 5% interest on the amount you overpaid? Because that's what they take from you if you underpay (by accident or not). Living in the US is like: "oh you were born and live in the US? We're forcing you to give us a huge chunk of your earnings for your entire working life, make it close to impossible to determine the exact amounts and then fine you 5% interest if you happen to underpay, but we'll never…
Sure, the gov't cashed the check and held on to the money for like two months, but the interest at the end was a pleasant surprise.
I popped "file free tax returns turbotax" into Google and found the page directly listed. The page in question is https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi... The robots.txt for the intuit.com domain is: https://turbotax.intuit.com/robots.txt Not listing in robots.txt to block the personal-taxes folder, which has many offerings and a sub from that is the free one. I'm not seeing the block that the…
The Free Edition basically dark patterns you into a paid version of TurboTax at the end. My friend in grad school was confused and ended up paying for the deluxe version, even though she started on the free version and makes like a thousand dollars a month.
I wonder what the minimum-effort private organization would be which could comply with IRS rules to offer free filing of extensions, 1040ez, etc. I'd happily throw in $1k toward it (even though I'm not eligible, and thanks to Puerto Rico, don't need to file federal taxes, probably, after 2019). Just offering a simple, responsible, and stress free process for these filings, ideally with zero advertising, or just a bri…
There's been other efforts in the past/currently.
Some examples:
Open Tax Solver: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/
1040 Spreadsheet: https://sites.google.com/site/excel1040/home/instructions
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> if we disagree we may ask you to pay more The opposite can happen, too. The last time they disagreed with me on how much tax I should have paid, they mailed me a check for the difference.
Did they give you 5% interest on the amount you overpaid? Because that's what they take from you if you underpay (by accident or not). Living in the US is like: "oh you were born and live in the US? We're forcing you to give us a huge chunk of your earnings for your entire working life, make it close to impossible to determine the exact amounts and then fine you 5% interest if you happen to underpay, but we'll never…
Also, it sounds like you're referring to the penalty for underpayment, which I believe is currently 3.6% of the total underpayment for the year [0]. This only kicks in under certain circumstances.
Google "turbotax free" which returns https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi... This is not recent either. I remember getting to this page from Google on tax day. Google "turbotax" and it returns the free edition link nested under the first result.
The "Fremium" version exists to upsell you to death, the FreeFile version can't do that.
You've fallen for their trick.
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> The real story is the absolute travesty of government corruption that TurboTax and HR Block have perpetrated by making it illegal for the government to make tax filing as easy as it should be You know this applies to pretty much every service in the US right? A company wants to make massive profits, so it just lobbies and buys the laws it wants. Healthcare, private prisons, banking, "security" (TSA), education, tra…
I don't know why, but all of this "privatization" bugs the hell out of me. Maybe it has something to with wanting to see my taxes being used properly, rather than going to a private company's profits. Maybe it's the abstraction; that'd I like to know that the workers I see doing the work for the government are government employees, and that I am, in some small way, helping them? I mean, sure, with a private company t…
TT doesn't include this very common form in their free bundle and wanted me to pay $40 to upgrade.
While H&R Block also gets criticized- I have to say that they include this form, and I was able to file completely free for both federal and state, without having to hunt for a link- just started on their normal site. They also allowed automatic import of W2s, easy import of TurboTax previous years, etc.
As someone who lives outside of the US, can someone please explain how the US government has not implemented its own free tax filing system? In my home country this hasn't been a thing for over 10 years.
If you print out the forms and fill them out by hand, the only cost is the the envelope & stamp to mail them in. What the US Federal Government/IRS doesn't have is a free way to e-file taxes online.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
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Did they give you 5% interest on the amount you overpaid? Because that's what they take from you if you underpay (by accident or not). Living in the US is like: "oh you were born and live in the US? We're forcing you to give us a huge chunk of your earnings for your entire working life, make it close to impossible to determine the exact amounts and then fine you 5% interest if you happen to underpay, but we'll never…
Yes, the IRS will pay you interest under certain circumstances. Two examples are when they are late processing a refund or when a prior return is amended. I got a 1099-INT from the IRS in 2018. The interest rate is not 5%, however. Also, 5% is not currently the risk free rate of return. Also, it sounds like you're referring to the penalty for underpayment, which I believe is currently 3.6% of the total underpayment f…
Because this year I got hit by some underpayment penalties (with interest added on top) but at the same time I also got a refund which had no interest applied to it.
That is being self employed and paying estimated taxes every quarter.