71–80 of 610 posts
Is there a way to do your taxes without paying any money?
Currently, many Federal tax forms are supported, as well as tax filing for the state of Illinois. Filing for Oregon and California is under development!
I know that ship has sailed, but I really wish politicians would go back to making promises that have an impact on everyone like abolishing tax fillings. It might be different in the US, but in Canada I file my taxes using the CRA's data directly. TurboTax even fetches it directly from their website. What's the point? They have my T4, my T2202 (studies) and everything else. Just send me a letter telling me how much m…
Intuit and HR Block spend way too much on US lobbying for that to change. The first step has to be repealing Citizen's United. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Citizen's United was a group that made a political-advocacy movie and the FEC wanted to treat it as regulated political activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not confident in my ability to get my taxes right (mostly due to my wife and I having owned small businesses plus my day job's stock awards and ESPP), so I've paid a local CPA to do our taxes for years now. He always did an incredible job, was happy to answer my questions for me (tax-related or not), helped us refi our house at an amazing price, and so on. His fees were something on the order of $400 or maybe eve…
Hiring a CPA was one of the best decisions I have made in my entire adult life.
CPA can also be useful beyond just tax filing. My CPA does a half year evaluation to see if I'd owe any additional tax and plan accordingly. They also makes sure I get all the deductions I can.
Is there a way to do your taxes without paying any money?
If you have deductions, stock sales, a nanny, a business, etc then you need the regular 1040 and various schedules, and those are all complex enough that you'd probably benefit from software. It's not absolutely required, but there are enough ways to do it wrong (like adding up the wrong lines) that the peace of mind alone is probably worth it to you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not confident in my ability to get my taxes right (mostly due to my wife and I having owned small businesses plus my day job's stock awards and ESPP), so I've paid a local CPA to do our taxes for years now. He always did an incredible job, was happy to answer my questions for me (tax-related or not), helped us refi our house at an amazing price, and so on. His fees were something on the order of $400 or maybe eve…
It's not like an honest mistake is the end of the world. I've made tax mistakes. You get a letter from the IRS, with the amount you owe or are due back, and you settle up. There are no draconian penalties or full audits unless they suspect intentional fraud.
I manually filed a revision to a previous tax year in which I had accidentally double-payed state taxes on a schedule K-2 disbursement two years back. Without any background in this I was able to follow the IRS and state-gov websites to get everything together and ultimately received my check for the difference (many thousands of dollars). All without paying a dollar.
I manually filed taxes on paper (federal) last year and they still have not been processed. Got a letter that the IRS is sitting on my 5-figure tax payment but haven't gone through the 1040 yet. There is an institutional (mainly Republican) commitment to strangling the IRS here in the US. Filing taxes should be free and easy.
Or, ideally, not needed at all. In the UK having an average financial situation like a job (one that doesn’t pay megabucks, anyway), a pension, a tax-efficient savings account and a student doesn’t require any filing at all. Everything happens through payroll. If you do earn a lot or have other things that trigger the need to file it’s free and not overly onerous — certainly within the grasp of a mere mortal.
(And before someone chimes in with “how do you know the government gets the figures right?!”: because the tax code, or at least the parts that face most people, is straightforward and most people have a bog-standard default configuration that is easy to verify.)
Fuck these companies.
Good, but the situation is so much worse than just this. Most Americans could just use the IRS Free File system, which the article mentions, instead of ever giving money to Intuit or H&R Block ever again. But we don’t heavily advertise that system, because that would encourage people to use it, and if you’re going that far, you might as well let the IRS build its own tax software with all your information prefilled l…
The problem truly is advertising, like you said. The government just cannot out-advertise companies that are doing $9 billion in revenue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, the Republican Party has a history of intentionally pushing for cumbersome tax filing as part of encouraging people to hate the idea of taxes in general.
I don't think it's a Republican thing, the Liberal party and the NPD in Canada are both left-leaning and they have a majority yet they aren't pushing for this. Pretty sure it's just run-of-the-mill lobbying and corruption unfortunately. A typical "think of the jobs!" type of thing.
See e.g. http://reason.org/files/ba148cd5babdda39f9ebb43b336b01d4.pdf
I manually filed a revision to a previous tax year in which I had accidentally double-payed state taxes on a schedule K-2 disbursement two years back. Without any background in this I was able to follow the IRS and state-gov websites to get everything together and ultimately received my check for the difference (many thousands of dollars). All without paying a dollar.
I manually filed taxes on paper (federal) last year and they still have not been processed. Got a letter that the IRS is sitting on my 5-figure tax payment but haven't gone through the 1040 yet. There is an institutional (mainly Republican) commitment to strangling the IRS here in the US. Filing taxes should be free and easy.