So in Canada I pay about $15 CAD to file for my household. It takes 20 mins and is submitted digitally. Is this the equivalent of the issue in the USA or is it more expensive or something? I get that free filing is kind of obvious as a right, but the online service really does give me $15 of value so I've never thought to be upset by it.
If you're in Canada I can't recommend SimpleTax [1] enough. Donation-based, so free or what you can pay. Was recently acquired by Wealthsimple. [1] https://simpletax.ca/
Thanks so much for sharing. I wasn't aware and will try it this time.
It's so insane to me that Grover Norquist somehow lobbied against free tax filing provided by the IRS. It escapes all logic that he didn't pay attention to what other countries do. It escapes all logic that he didn't think for a moment about what the cost would be to citizens in (more or less direct payments to Intuit) and that's not considering the incalculable cost of just gathering up all this documentation and put it into TurboTax.
Billions of dollars in lost man power? Billions of dollars in wealth transfers from middle and lower class people? Probably more like Trillions.
Norquist didn't succeed in drowning the government in the bathtub. He DID successfully manage to keep the entire US citizenry drowning in billions of hours of wasted effort and billions of dollars of unnecessary expenditures. Good work, Norquist!
In the US, we've had decades of (largely GOP) messaging that the government can't do anything properly. A substantial portion of the population believes it. As noted in a sibling comment, the IRS could pre-fill forms that would be correct for the vast majority of tax payers (who take the standard deduction/don't itemize, have a single job, and no other edge cases). These people should not be paying TurboTax either wa…
I think are more steelman'ed version of the GOP argument is: when government does things badly, they can go VERY VERY badly.
It's a risk viewpoint. Whereas the progressive viewpoint letting government do more and more things.
The other risk is bloat. Once a government program exists, it is very very hard to stop it and get the funds back ( from a political perspective ). It's unpopular to fire people.
When government does bad, it gets more money ( bigger ), to do worse things, or other pathological outcomes. When industry does bad, it merely gets replaced by another company.
It's not so much saying that all government is bad, but it's looking at worse case scenarios and balancing risk.
In the US, we've had decades of (largely GOP) messaging that the government can't do anything properly. A substantial portion of the population believes it. As noted in a sibling comment, the IRS could pre-fill forms that would be correct for the vast majority of tax payers (who take the standard deduction/don't itemize, have a single job, and no other edge cases). These people should not be paying TurboTax either wa…
> messaging that the government can't do anything properly I would love to hear about things the government has done exceptionally better than private companies. Please go on.
USPS is often faster and cheaper than private delivery companies, delivers to all addresses (unlike FedEx and UPS, which contract to USPS in rural areas), and would be profitable if not hamstrung by pension funding restrictions from Congress that are more stringent than private companies.
The IRS is perhaps the one government agency that just does not fuck around. It's always sensible to make sure that filing for taxes is as smooth as possible, at least for those who wish to abide by the rules. Follow the money.
Many agencies are well-intentioned but wear congressional straight jackets. It's not all Anjit Pai land.
Any further examples of regulators not captured by industry in 2019?
This USA tax thing has always baffled me... it is the exact definition of why we pay taxes: for the government to provide services that are common to the country´s citizens. There´s nothing more common than tax collection: rich, middle class or poor. Why wouldn't citizens demand a public tax filing process? Even in Mexico we have an automagical tax filing process that makes: a) The great majority of the population wh…
I think it comes down to who people trust. Americans on the whole don't trust their government quite a lot. If the government just said "you owe X in tax this year", nearly everyone's knee jerk reaction would be that the government is overestimating and cheating them. On the other hand, you can pay a flat fee to let a third party fight the government on your behalf. That's something that many Americans like the sound…
It's the same problem as with auto repair and medicine. It's nice that we have competing providers, except we don't have the expertise to judge their performance.
> There is no reason the IRS shouldn't have a simple, online fillable 1099EZ that makes the calculations and validations for you. It is largely due to Republicans that we don't have such a program. Voting matters. https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...
> Voting matters Gerrymandering and voter purging matters
FWIW, The GOP control of the senate is clearly not due to gerrymandering, or at least not any gerrymandering that happened in the past 100 years.
I think gerrymandering is an issue, but it's only a fraction of the reason why representation is not particularly proportional.
In the US, we've had decades of (largely GOP) messaging that the government can't do anything properly. A substantial portion of the population believes it. As noted in a sibling comment, the IRS could pre-fill forms that would be correct for the vast majority of tax payers (who take the standard deduction/don't itemize, have a single job, and no other edge cases). These people should not be paying TurboTax either wa…
Along the same lines, there used to be three different tax forms: the standard 1040 form, then two progressively more simplified forms for people who didn't want to do itemized deductions. Well, the GOP takes power in 2016, and declares that they will "reduce" paperwork by removing... the two simplified forms! Now everyone has to fill out the complete 1040, which is also now strangely cramped and calls out to a dozen…
From a refactoring perspective this actually made a lot of sense. One source of truth (1040) not three (1040, 1040A, 1040EZ). The complex parts of the 1040 have been refactored into separate functions named Schedule 1, Schedule2, ..., Schedule 6. The problem isn't in the forms its in the laws which necessitate line items in the form to begin with.
If you think about it the 1040 has taken on the more simple case as the default and the more complex cases have been shifted into schedules. That's a good thing in my book.
100% agree. To me they seem to be playing this perverse game of knowing how much you owe based on your W-2s then not telling you, waiting for you to file and guess how much you owe just right. If you guess wrong tough luck, you get penalties years later.
As an average Joe it seems like it can be pretty much impossible to figure out the rules in any number of corner cases. For example. I'm considering installing Solar Panels on my house. The entirety of the official IRS guidance (in the manuals) is this: "Qualified solar electric property costs are costs for property that uses solar energy to generate electricity for use in your home located in the United States. No c…
It may be worthwhile to consult a tax attorney. The IRS help line is just a help line, they aren't tax attorneys and they can't give legal advice, which I think this qualifies as.
I'm not a tax attorney, or an attorney at all, and so this isn't legal advice, but IME if you make an honest mistake, the IRS will usually send you a letter informing you of this and you'll get a chance to make it right.