151–160 of 466 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a bit naive of the government to reveal to you your income sources they know about. If you have any hidden ones you can confidently not report them and pay less taxes than you would otherwise.
Until you're selected for a random audit and quickly get charged with tax fraud.
Just for comparison: in Brazil the _Receita Federal_ (IRS equivalent) provides a free multi-platform* Java desktop app for filing your taxes. The UI isn't great* and if you do complex stock trading it can be a pain to add the necessary information, but for the vast majority of people it works just fine. It also shows if it is better to use the standard deduction or the itemized deductions for your particular case and…
The government makes a draft declaration for you, if it's OK you just have to digitally sign your agreement and provide a bank account to pay or receive your return (if you haven't already done that in the past). Otherwise you need to edit it adding whatever they've missed, but this is only needed if you do complex stock trading, operate with money abroad, etc. For most people it's just skimming through it in case there is an obvious error, and confirming the draft.
Once you confirm the draft, it takes only around 2-4 days for the tax return money to appear in your bank account.
The website's UI is good. Spanish e-administration webapps are a bit hit-and-miss, some are dreadful (digital certificate request, I'm looking at you), but that particular one is fine and has always worked well for me.
I have a W2 job, and my employer presumably has sent my paystubs and tax information to the government already. I then have to copy down the information from my W2 into some kind of tax filing software, and then they have to check to make sure that what I typed matches what they have, presumably paying someone to do that if I make any kind of serious mistake. Why do I have to do anything?
I'd understand if I have a lot of complex deductions or if I were running my own business, but as it stands I do the basic standard deduction (or whatever the default options on TurboTax are).
I'm genuinely asking this...is there some utility that I'm missing here to me doing the taxes myself?
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Who else lobbies like Intuit? Who else spends millions of dollars on defeating measures intended to make paying taxes simpler and easier?
The Republican party? Seriously Grover Norquist wants taxes to be painful so you associate them with bad feelings. They made it illegal to compete with TurboTax by offering a free piece of software from the IRS. Look up California's FreeFile software. There is nothing Republicans have done that helps taxpayers unless they make over a higher than average amount of money. I'm not even trying to be political, this has j…
Norquist is a great example of a lobbyist worth examining. He's a real piece of shit. His group is Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). Their 2019 sheet shows $390k spread across 6 lobbyists who did not hide their representation; they had opinions on a variety of issues and bills, all related somehow to taxation. [0] Intuit's sheet shows spending of $1.28m in that same time period, spread across at least ten firms, including dozens of revolving-door politicos and industry insiders, all aimed at one single piece of legislation: The Taxpayer First Act of 2019, an attempt to modernize tax legislation and filing processes. [1] Surprisingly, ATR has officially said nothing about the Taxpayer First Act, despite Norquist's well-publicized position against such efforts.
To recap: Intuit spent 3x what Norquist's group spent, and focused that spend on one specific bill which would have eased tax filing. If Norquist is a piece of shit, what does that make Intuit?
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D00004709...
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientbills.php?id=D000026...
Intuit's main argument has always been that if the government provided such a service many people would overpay their taxes.
Honestly it's much cheaper, easier & better to just find a good accountant to do your taxes instead of Turbo Tax.
The government could do a lot to make filing taxes & starting businesses easier. All the politicians talking about being pro-small business could really start at these 2 steps. Otherwise, imho, their talk is nothing but empty promises. Creating hurdles like this is just a way of gate-keeping lower incomes out of small businesses.
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And yet the cost of implementing a government algorithm has not yet fallen to near-zero. Furthermore, the government has surely implemented the algorithm itself in order to verify submitted tax returns, so the implementation cost of pre-computing everyone's tax should be comparatively small.
Maybe I’m overly cynical, but creating tax returns for everyone for free would prevent the IRS from allowing you to incriminate yourself by mis-filing (intentionally or not) and then levying huge penalties and interest on you 10 years later. Everyone is hating on TurboTax for making money, but they’re pretending the government tax machine has no such motivation, which simply is not true.
Many countries pre-fill the tax return, but require the citizen to submit it. The citizen is responsible for the submitted information, not the government.
Maybe I'm totally wrong here, but I don't see much of a difference between extorsionist tax filing software and scam callers warning me about the IRS suing me. Can the government please make something that's easy to use? Filing taxes isn't something that requires a separate company to help with, and I see no reason why these products have a right to exist (and especially not be canonized), especially with how exploit…
> I see no reason why these products have a right to exist (and especially not be canonized), especially with how exploitive they are or can be. But if we remove the annual pain of dealing with taxes, then Americans will get complacent and may stop being bothered by having to pay taxes. - The serious ideology of a major American political party vis-a-vis taxes.
Within a few days I received a letter from a private company informing me that unless I pay them $1000 to publish the name of my LLC in two public newspapers for six weeks, one daily newspaper and one weekly newspaper, in 120 days my LLC would need to cease doing business in NY. I pull out my phone and did a quick online search. Lo and behold, there is a law that says the same.
In this golden age, the government has chosen to require me to pay a private archaic company to print in ink thousands of times on paper the silly name of an LLC I just came up with, then proceed to distribute it by truck to a bunch of old people that then proceed to throw it in the garbage.
No fancy tax algorithms would be required for NY to simply drop this nonsensical requirement. Maybe this process exists because there are groups of people making a small fortune from it?
I really don't understand why I have to file my taxes to begin with. I have a W2 job, and my employer presumably has sent my paystubs and tax information to the government already. I then have to copy down the information from my W2 into some kind of tax filing software, and then they have to check to make sure that what I typed matches what they have, presumably paying someone to do that if I make any kind of seriou…
There have been proposals to mail cards to taxpayers with their financial information (as known to the government) pre-printed, and if everything is accurate, the recipient does nothing at all. TurboTax (and a few others) lobbied heavily to make sure such efforts were defeated, and so you have to keep doing your own taxes.
But please, stop using TurboTax to do so!
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So what? Fuck TurboTax trying to rent seek mine and anyone's ability to pay taxes. What's next? Feudalism?
You know, there’s a paper form you can fill out and send in for free if you’re that angry about it.
For example, I used to work in New Jersey, and live in New York, meaning I would have to file two state tax returns, in addition to the federal. There are weird rules that you can deduct one state's taxes from the other, and then deduct the remainder from the federal taxes. The rules get complex really quickly, and even with helpful software I made a mistake one year resulting in a fine. I can't imagine how frequently I'd make mistakes if I had to do it manually.
TurboTax definitely provides a service by making it so that schmucks like me can do taxes, but if the tax code is that complex, shouldn't we have a software like this for free? At the very least, to provide some motivations to politicians to help simplify the tax code?