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Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

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Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#121

Post by asadotzler »

colonwqbang wrote: post #85

> The Biden administration announced Friday that its first-of-its-kind free tax filing website... In the rest of the world in many places we have been filling taxes directly online for many years. Sorry Americans, you did not invent free electronic tax filing. You are at least twenty years late to the party.

We've had electronic filing for probably as long as any country, but in the US, no corporation gets left behind so financial services companies get to rip us off when we electronically file.

Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#122

Post by nneonneo »

willcipriano wrote: post #36
nneonneo wrote: post #2

I did my Canadian taxes for me and my spouse on a free filing site last night, in less than two hours, for $0. Everything was prefilled; practically the only thing I had to fix was to convert an imported investment statement from USD to CAD, and double check that everything was accurate. I welcome the Americans to the delightful convenience of hassle-free taxes!

> less than two hours > hassle-free taxes That's still a crazy demand on the time of someone paying for everything. My bank, my employer and my brokerage all report on me, the IRS should be able to just mail a check or a bill most of the time.

I have a bunch of USD-denominated stuff for which my brokerage doesn’t always issue complete tax slips for, so it required going over my statements to double check that everything was being accounted correctly.

My wife’s (uncomplicated) taxes basically took 15 minutes. You do always want to check to make sure that you’ve hit every tax deduction you can - for example, work-from-home deductions, donation deductions, even things like paying for news subscriptions gets a tax credit. That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t get reported to the CRA, but which you can claim tax deductions on.

Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#124

Post by asadotzler »

LoganDark wrote: post #57
monero-xmr wrote: post #11

Most Americans don’t do their own taxes. They go to H&R Block or Jackson Hewitt, and if your family makes under $60k you are almost certainly paying no income taxes and are receiving a refund via the EITC, getting a check back. So people think tax preparers are voodoo priests that do their incantations to get free money because the average person can’t understand the jargon, can’t handle forms, and the whole endeavor…

> if your family makes under $60k you are almost certainly paying no income taxes How is this possible? Where I live, you can expect to pay around 30% of your income as tax almost regardless of how much money you actually make (as long as it's above something like $600 a year).

Yes. If you and your spouse both make minimum wage and not a cent more, and you have two children or more, you can come out about even. How many two child families do you know with both parents earning absolute minimum wage?

Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#125

Post by nilamo »

alistairSH wrote: post #103
altdataseller wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about expenses for those that are self employed? What about rental income? What about expenses related to rental properties? Lots of things the government doesn’t know…

None of which apply to the vast majority of filers. Nobody is saying filing taxes should never be necessary. Only that it shouldn’t be necessary for most people. The flow should be… Employer and financial institutions send info to IRS (they mostly do already). Then, in January, IRS sends a “Is this correct?” notice to residents. If correct, no action is needed. If not correct, then make adjustments.

100% agree. These conversations always seem to end with lots of "what about"s, as if being easy for the average case was somehow undesirable.

Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#126

Post by flandish »

tmountain wrote: post #8

It’s amazing that 54% of adults in the United States have a literacy below 6th grade level, but it is expected for the same population to have the financial literacy to file their taxes accurately. Going further, the IRS already knows the details of most people’s taxes before they file, yet everyone is expected to complete what amounts to a complex task for many people. I cannot fathom why it is still done this way.

> cannot fathom

Yes you can. It’s capitalism. The owners of the current system lobby and advertise and “manufacture consent” in keeping the current system because it is wildly profitable.

That’s really all there is to it.

Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#127

Post by deadlydose »

colonwqbang wrote: post #85

> The Biden administration announced Friday that its first-of-its-kind free tax filing website... In the rest of the world in many places we have been filling taxes directly online for many years. Sorry Americans, you did not invent free electronic tax filing. You are at least twenty years late to the party.

You understand context, right?

Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#128

Post by pembrook »

Barrin92 wrote: post #44
thegrim33 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it was originally done this way because in the past people actually had some semblance of privacy and the government didn't actually know a great deal about people's income. Eventually, privacy was eroded away year after year to the point where the government now knows an extreme amount about each citizen. I guess I'd refrain the question - instead of asking why do we need to do taxes when the government know…

>we change the way the government is intimately entangled with our lives? I've lived in Sweden where taxes are not just automatically filed but every citizen can trivially look up anyone's tax returns and nobody ever saw it as the government being intimately entangled with anyone's life. Privacy violation would be to look into how and on what you spend your money, not that everyone pays their share of taxes. That tel…

Except in Sweden, what this means in practice, is that you only see the income/cap gains taxes paid of ordinary middle class people.

Rich people in the Nordics hold their wealth in foreign companies as retained earnings, and thus that wealth accrues gains/dividends tax free and remains invisible until they sell off a small portion for the purpose of buying something.

It's "transparency" only for the plebs. Americans cannot do this, as they are subject to global tax and extra punitive taxation on foreign withheld earnings.

Also, Swedes don't have the same level of real estate transparency that there is in America (property tax assessments put a public value on everyone's holdings in the US). Wealthy folks holding real estate between different countries in Europe makes the whole situation more shadowy than you might think.

Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#129

Post by zamadatix »

nox101 wrote: post #118
tmountain wrote: post #8

It’s amazing that 54% of adults in the United States have a literacy below 6th grade level, but it is expected for the same population to have the financial literacy to file their taxes accurately. Going further, the IRS already knows the details of most people’s taxes before they file, yet everyone is expected to complete what amounts to a complex task for many people. I cannot fathom why it is still done this way.

> It’s amazing that 54% of adults in the United States have a literacy below 6th grade level, AFAICT this is a mis-interpretation. IIUC the actual study says "54% of adults in the United States have a literacy IN ENGLISH below 6th grade level". They might be highly literate in some other language but that wasn't tested.

This may be a misinterpretation in the study but even if every single multilingual person in the US was counted as not being proficient the number would not meaningfully change in context of the conversation (i.e. still above 1/3 in the extreme case).

Re: Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site

#130

Post by latency-guy2 »

loeg wrote: post #108
PopAlongKid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why does EITC exist? To relieve the regressive payroll tax (FICA) on low-income families.

FICA taxes aren't regressive.

"Regressive" in this context really doesn't mean anything, it's a label that is reached for when politically convenient.

So I agree.

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