[flagged]
> Compare this with the self-employed who seem to "obsess" over taxes, despite barely paying a higher rate. I'd wager that it's because it's hard for me, as an employed person, to fuck up my taxes so badly that the tax authorities would come gunning for me; most of that is handled by my employer's other employees. I just fill out a pretty basic form, and count myself done. Where as if I were self employed, I'd have t…
A Canadian payroll dependency chart
51–60 of 301 posts
Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#52This demonstrates how any algorithm, software or not, works: Start with something desirable or necessary and add complications until you end up with a mess that can be used to yield arbitrary results, drive outsiders into madness, and summon some lesser demons if read in a chanting manner. Now what could be done about this? The obvious answer is refactoring. That's what politicians promise in election campaigns and j…
10-15 years ago there were piles of special exemptions carved out for all sorts of things (mostly to buy votes.) These days, if you don't have self-employment or foreign investments, etc and are just the typical paycheque-receiving wage slave, filing taxes is trivial and mostly automatic.
The bulk of the complication in the above graph seems to do with the fact that Canada is a highly federal system, with provinces having various relevant powers and oddities carved out as a result of that. That, and the existence federal employment insurance and pension plan systems.
Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#53[flagged]
For those who care about finance and want to know - it is easy to figure out where your money is. With a 401k you do have basic choices and can monitor things pretty well. Other alternatives seem to be pensions (where the employee really can see nothing) or leaving it to each person to decide completely (which the government doesn't like because a certain amount will blow it all and then they will have to pay for them when they are old anyways)
Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#54Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#55[flagged]
Not sure if this is what you were getting at but in Pennsylvania, US, the school and local taxes are collected by a variety of law firms / tax firms with no relation to the government because they are entirely private firms that have been given full reins.
So the municipal tax firm for county A may not be the same for county B. What makes this even more terrifying is you only learn this when you get your first "pay us or else" letter from a law firm that essentially is just "we are your municipal tax authority, pay us $600 because we have calculated you are wrong".
And apparently they are frequently wrong and assume best case scenarios in their favor. There's a huge collection of "Is this a scam?" questions about it online. For an example of how terrible they are, if you move to PA in May, there is a very good chance they'll demand taxes for the year previous to when you lived there. That's what happened to me and apparently many others.
Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#56[flagged]
Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#57Would be nice to have an open source implementation of this.
This requires constant updating and maintenance because tax laws are always changing.
Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#58Are there any countries with good, reasonable tax systems? I'm only familiar with Canada and the USA, both of which are a bit of a mess, though seemingly in different ways. I'd be very interested in hearing what the process is like in other places.
The EU has VAT (value added tax) which is added to each purchase. At the end of the year, there is nothing to report and nothing to pay. It doesn't get much simpler than this.
Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#59The fun part about being Canadian is that you get to compete with the entire world for remote jobs with Canadian companies, but no company based outside of Canada wants to deal with hoops required to hire a remote employee based in Canada if they don’t already have a presence here.
Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart
#60That's funny, I made something similar a few years ago for the IRS https://nampas.github.io/tax-map/