191–200 of 610 posts
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Seems like one could setup an org/corp and get funding from those states to implement tax filing code.
Many states already have ways to file online for free. For example, Illinois: https://www2.illinois.gov/rev/programs/mytax/Pages/il-1040.a...
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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 found out from a friend that she paid $600 to have her taxes done because (presumably) she falls for the dark patterns that TurboTax uses. She's a low paid service worker whose tax return can probably be done for free. And it is a sizable portion of her income because of things like Earned income tax credits, child tax credits, etc. Fuck these companies.
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The government has enough information to process the taxes for most of us or at least publicly make it super easy. TurboTax just lobbies the government to not do so.
About two weeks ago, I got a letter from the IRS telling me that I owe an extra eight-thousand dollars from my 2020 return, with a $1000 fine and $200 interest as a result. [1] I'm not mad about owing the money, but what annoys me is if they have enough information to know that I underreported, then why am I part of this equation to begin with? Clearly they have enough of my tax data to know I screwed up, so why don'…
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About two weeks ago, I got a letter from the IRS telling me that I owe an extra eight-thousand dollars from my 2020 return, with a $1000 fine and $200 interest as a result. [1] I'm not mad about owing the money, but what annoys me is if they have enough information to know that I underreported, then why am I part of this equation to begin with? Clearly they have enough of my tax data to know I screwed up, so why don'…
You can file taxes without a software package, if you want. You have to file because they want you to report things they don't know about, and also if you want to claim itemized deductions.
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> paying taxes being hard is good because it reminds you how much money you give the government Wouldn't it be the opposite? Having a complicated tax system makes it harder to find out how much you're paying. If things were simpler it would be much more apparent.
As a non-American who's not self-employed or a business owner I get a monthly payslip with my gross pay and the tax deduction. I see that every month, I know exactly how much I pay the government. All my investments also have tax deducted by the provider as well, when applicable. I never have to think about calculating or filing tax, but I always see it and know exactly how much it is.
And they try to trick you at every step to "upgrade" to the paid version...
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> 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 have any room for error. Why do you say that? I've never encountered people who were terrified nor have I read about it. How many people are…
My wife and her parents. Not her sisters though, admittedly. It's possible that I'm just reacting to a biased sample of people. But my impression was that this is a common mindset for a nontrivial subset of the population. Being afraid of doing something wrong on your government forms isn't really an irrational fear. Anyone who's owned a car in Chicago will tell you that the city's goal is to extract as many thousand…
That does not at all match my experience, it's widely discussed every year, and I wonder how many returns are late.
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…
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As a counter-example, sales taxes (and VATs) are very simple, yet almost nobody knows how much they’re paying.
In Europe VAT is a line item on every invoice. And apparently in the US you have to do some mental gymnastics to manually add sales tax to the listed price to figure out how much to pay in the first place. Of course most people have no idea how much VAT they pay for Amazon purchases in a year, but that's mostly a product of them not knowing how much they spend on Amazon in a year. If they know the latter, the former…
Due to complexity, all larger stores with multiple geographic locations would never have separate pricing signage for every single store, so they don't. Other stores do the same. It's all calculated at the register as things are scanned in the computer.