191–200 of 256 posts
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It turns out that paying an accountant is a good defense against audits if your tax situation has any complexity at all
Is it though. You're the one liable for issues on your tax return. You're the one who signed the return.
It's crazy to me that all Americans have to do their taxes every year and are charged for this. Many people in the UK go their entire lives without ever interacting with HMRC (our equivalent of the IRS) Self Assessment (doing taxes every year) takes about 20-30 minutes and that's when I'm claiming tax reliefs
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It turns out that paying an accountant is a good defense against audits if your tax situation has any complexity at all
Sorry I assumed my question implied that was what was being asked. What is the complexity because I’ve done my own taxes for two decades, every year things are nuanced and slightly different. Never have I used an accountant.
1. You don't have to figure out which forms to file by yourself. This quickly becomes non-trivial if you run a business, take a lot of deductions, or have weird forms of income.
2. The IRS sees that your return was prepared by a professional, so it is much less likely that they will try for an audit (since a professional will be representing you).
If your tax liability is under $100k and your return is under ~20 pages, you mostly don't need one, but an accountant also doesn't charge much either (about the same price as TurboTax).
Every year I ask, and every year I'm disappointed, but does any good solution exist for expats? I know I shouldn't be paying taxes, since I earn under the exception limit. But I don't know all the forms I should fill out, and all of the websites dedicated to expats are expensive, almost $500.
What exception? If you are a citizen and intend on returning to the US (or even intend to renounce) you should be in good standing with the IRS (FBARs and annual filings). You owe the difference between locally paid taxes and federal taxes, and can claim overpayment as tax credits. Most low-earners don't bother with this and use the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion Act [1]. Don't forget about FBARs if you have more th…
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Being a US citizen abroad. I’m in this situation and have had to pay huge sums to accountants If anyone has any recommendations I’m all ears
Why are you paying an accountant?
Call me crazy but I think it's a bad idea to do your taxes this early. I've gotten so many amended forms over the years that eat up so much time filing amended returns that I wait until the last minute now.
Flip side is identity thieves do your taxes early for you and get your refund.
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Right, the point is that we can and should get that down to 5 minutes. It's just stupid lobbying and weird ideology to insist that the IRS stay out of the preparation business. And then once they start doing it, they can probably figure out how to do it for a larger and larger percentage of people over time (and the tax code can be adjusted to make it work better in cases where it makes sense).
I think you’re unintentionally making the weird ideologues’ point for them: The burden of taxes isn’t the 5, 10, 20, 200 minutes you spend preparing them, the burden is the taxes . Getting excited about saving taxpayers 15 minutes, and trading off $thousands of deductions for a few more minutes, suggests that you’re optimizing for obscuring the primary burden (the cost of government) rather than reducing it. It’s the…
It's also sort of silly to go on about making sure that people understand the "burden", when government should obviously be restricting itself to things that are a net benefit to society. Of course there will be disagreements about the value of a given activity or service, but the notion that government must be a burden is pretty backwards.
It's crazy to me that all Americans have to do their taxes every year and are charged for this. Many people in the UK go their entire lives without ever interacting with HMRC (our equivalent of the IRS) Self Assessment (doing taxes every year) takes about 20-30 minutes and that's when I'm claiming tax reliefs
While the Tax Compliance scam is something that needs to be addressed, I am also not a fan of completely automated and "easy" taxation. I think government taking our money should be painful, and in your face.
I am not even a fan of automated payroll deduction for this reason, people should experience having the money removed from them every month, week, what ever just like any other bill they have to pay.
This psychologically is a check on government overspending as if people were paying 25+% of their income, as a bill payment every month to their government they would be more prone to ask why, instead of what many do today which is just look at their net income and treat the refund as a savings plan or even worse the government "giving" them money
We have made it entirely tooooooo easy for governments to take money from us
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I volunteer with VITA and do taxes a lot but not a full time accountant. I've been doing my own taxes for years. I would say you need your own accountant and not software if: 1) You have complexities involving trusts/inheritance 2) Anything involving crypto (this is just a grey area to me and things change) 3) Anything that sounds more complex than anything above. If you're getting a bunch of 1099-DIVs/INT & W2/W9s i…
Crypto is simple. Anything mined/airdroped is ordinary income, anything bought and later sold is capital gains.