151–160 of 610 posts
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!
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In México if you are an average employee earning less than around $50000 usd (I.e. most workers), your employer can "do" your taxes (very simple, they report what they have withheld from you). If you have some amounts you want to regain from losses, etc., you can still do your taxes manually. That means logging into the free MEX IRS platform, which shows all your tax info preffilled. Most likely the stuff you want to…
What would be required for the US to adopt this solution?
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
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this is not how taxes work with the IRS. If you make a calculation error in their favour they will correct it and issue you a refund. If you make a compilation error in their favour and get reviewed or audited, you will get a refund. They also audit based more on discrepencies vs. "likelihood of a big payout". If they precalculated your taxes and sent you a bill (or refund) it would (a) be easier, (b) be more accurat…
You’re missing the point. The point is that the IRS isn’t aware of a good amount of income (trivial example is tips) unless you tell them about it.
I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org , an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes . 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'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org , an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes . 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!
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.... and just to be completely clear, this is only the way it is because of HUGE lobbying spends by Intuit.
IMO: The mind blowing element, is that in the grand scheme of things It's not actually that much money . I'm not sure if anyone knows the true amount, but estimates put the number spent on lobbying around a few million dollars. Opensecrets.org estimated ~$3.2m lobbying in 2021. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... For a company that makes $2 BILLION dollars a year, the amount they actually…
And thanks to Citizens United and similar decisions that have driven up the cost of US elections, US pols are very expensive compared to their counterparts in other countries.
It does make me wonder about the efficacy of standing up a lobbying fund to lobby to Do The Right Thing about something. This would be a prime example - I would happily pay $100 to compete with Intuit's lobbying here. I'm also certain there are 31,999 other people in the US who feel the same way.
I just don't have the energy to do the work of learning how to set up the corporate structure around that to make it legal.
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…
I tried to make this point in the other thread, so let me take another stab at it here. You say this like it's just a thing that people can do. But the people you're telling to "Just do this" have already been trained to be terrified of the IRS. Many of them are currently paying huge fines due to missing their returns in prior years. Any small mistake can hang you when you're impoverished, precisely because you don't…
Why do you say that? I've never encountered people who were terrified nor have I read about it. How many people are paying "huge fines"? AFAIK, the IRS's audit capacity is greatly underfunded.
Is there a way to do your taxes without paying any money?
I'm working with other contributors on https://ustaxes.org , an open source tax filing webapp https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes . 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!
How are states prioritized? Population and complexity? Or personal priorities of contributors?
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maybe the rest of us should start a gofundme so we can pool together our funds and buy a few politicians.
This has actually been done rather often in the past, you can start a donor driven PAC that can compete with corporate lobbyists with crowdfunding. It's generally quite a bit cheaper too because while we all love to criticize politicians for only listening to monied interests if they can raise some campaign funds and get brownie points for their voting base they're happy to dramatically spurn the corporate funding th…