121–130 of 341 posts
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Ever been to the DMV?
Blame your city government. St. Louis City Hall houses the DMV and all other city offices and the service is stellar. I've yet to have a bad experience in over two dozen trips there.
This stuff aggravates me. My taxes aren't abnormally complex (single, one state, very few deductions, one w-2), but I get several 1099s for my investments and end up spending an hour filling them in manually, importing CSV files from my brokerages, and double checking the numbers. What annoys me is all the forms clearly state the IRS has also been sent this information; I'm literally filling out forms in a slow, erro…
You forgot the part about when == is != they get to charge you a giant penalty. That's no accident.
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Login to IRS website, be shown all your data. Is this correct? Yes. No. buttons. Workflow is present to deal with incorrect data. The data is already submitted electronically by employers, brokerage/retirement asset management companies, states, etc. Why should I have to pay a private company (I'm looking at you Intuit) when the IRS should have the ability to provide the same service FOR FREE.
Government doesn't know your business expenses and various deductions (unless you want to stream your cash and credit card transactions directly to the IRS)
Yes, TurboTax is being rather transparently venal, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. I doubt the American government is competent enough to get tax calculations right, and I suspect they're hungry enough for revenue to make all their default assumptions in their favor. At least that's been my experience with every state and federal tax authority I've dealt with for the past half-decade or so. Once we have a tax co…
How do you foresee this happening if we -- the government and the public -- maintain a status quo in which feasible optimizations are never pursued because hey, we have a private alternative that doesn't charge too much to do it?
For the government to become more competent, the people have to demand reform. For people to demand reform, they have to be aware of how much better things could be. Private competition helps spur that reform, but this doesn't mean that the government shouldn't itself be expected to optimize things. This is not an either-or zero sum game
Frankly, anyone who does trust any government hasn't had very much experience with them. At best, governments are inefficient and incompetent. At worst, they are run by politicians absorbed with self-interest. There are already scads of people trusting too much to other entities rather than figuring it out on their own. These people leave their tax withholdings at default levels, then walk down to the local Wal-Mart…
For what it's worth, in 2012 I made less than $100,000 in AGI, withheld the W-4 default for my filing status (Single, Independent), and my refund was $650. More or less right on the mark.
Edit: Aha! Found it[0]. $100k biweekly is $1923/week of gross pay; let's ignore medicare and social security, etc. For Single/HoH, that's $344.20 + 28% of 1923-1732 = $397.68 weekly or $20679.36 / year[1]. Since our expected total tax is $18,500, we get back $2,100 in refund. Big-ish, but not $10,000. And only 2% of $100k.
[0]: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/calculate-employer-federal-wi...
[1]: page 44 of http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15.pdf
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I don't think they were fighting against online access to IRS data. I think they fought against pre-filled 1040 forms becoming default return without you actually having to do almost anything. The former is innocent and useful, the latter may be a bit more controversial, since the incentive of the IRS is to maximize the taxes, having IRS create the returns may not provide the best option for the people who use it.
> the incentive of the IRS is to maximize the taxes I'm not sure this is the case. IRS funding is not a static percentage of tax revenue. Sure, the tax money goes into one big pot, but IRS funding is not dependent upon the money they bring in.
Frankly, anyone who does trust any government hasn't had very much experience with them. At best, governments are inefficient and incompetent. At worst, they are run by politicians absorbed with self-interest. There are already scads of people trusting too much to other entities rather than figuring it out on their own. These people leave their tax withholdings at default levels, then walk down to the local Wal-Mart…
> The solution is not more government nanny-state ideas.
> How about requiring every person who receives 10% or more of their yearly salary back in a refund to attend classes on how to maximize their tax benefits?
> If you're too dumb or unaware of your surroundings to know that you can file your taxes for free with a little bit of effort, you need education.
I'm well educated, good with math, and generally observant....and yet I would still be up shit-creek if I had to do my taxes all on my own. I wouldn't know where to start, other than just searching around the 'net. I could figure it out eventually I'm sure, but it'd be a no-frills return that would probably rank very high on the "audit me!" list, and inevitably I'd end up spending more money, and taking around 10x's longer, than if I just settled for an online service (free or otherwise).
Just because I see spending a smallish amount ($25-50) to save several hours (if not 12+ hrs) of time, with the a decreased chance of audit, doesn't make me dumb nor unaware of my surroundings.
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I definitely agree with respect to income, estate, and property taxes. Consumption-based taxes are fairer than so-called "progressive" tax schemes implemented to fund world wars and military expansion. Ref. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/is-the-estat...
Property tax encourages those who aren't using a property to sell it. Real Estate ownership is already tracked (you can argue it shouldn't be, but that would upend the real estate system). And unlike cash sitting in a bank account, it's already fairly common to tax real estate. If someone wants to keep 5 houses and leave 4 of them empty at any given time, as a status symbol, shouldn't they be taxed punitively? Real e…
No.
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Exactly. We have the ability to do this, and private companies lobby against it (and win!) to protect their profit. What the fark.
So, you're comfortable with just trusting the government to tell you what you owe? I'd prefer to check the math myself.
Read the article. That's the idea. Check the math if you want, file your own paperwork if you want.
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You forgot the part about when == is != they get to charge you a giant penalty. That's no accident.
No one pays penalties for simple mistakes. That's what FOX news tells you, but it's not true. We've made five-figure goofs on taxes in the past and a simple letter explaining the mistake (assuming it's an explainable mistake and you didn't get caught in actual attempted fraud) is enough to get the penalty waved.
Besides, if you think about it, even if you figure the IRS is greedy and only motivated by money, the biggest returns for them are catching fraudulent millionaires dodging tens or hundreds of thousands, rather than slapping you with a $100 fine over a $2.38 mistake.