Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 288 posts

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

#91

Post by rufus_foreman »

cess11 wrote: post #80
rufus_foreman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a conflict of interest.

Right, so anyone using roads or having gone to school shouldn't vote?

I didn't say whether anyone should or shouldn't vote. I asked a question regarding whether people with conflicts of interest should be prevented from participating in a democratic society, through voting, or as a politician.

So should that be allowed or not?

I think people using roads, or schools, or getting welfare should be able to vote, I believe politicians getting monetary benefits from tax filing services should be allowed to speak.

I mean that's a pretty harsh decision, deciding that the government determines who is allowed to speak. That's what I was responding to.

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

#92

Post by oivey »

nilamo wrote: post #52
tlb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, to be fair to both sides, politicians who have received money from taxpayers should not be allowed to speak.

Isn't that all politicians? Or is their paycheck not counted?

Surely the system will be better if we make it so only the wealthy have roles in government.

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

#93

Post by valicord »

alright2565 wrote: post #77
LoganDark wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Pretty easy, assuming 2 kids filing jointly. Standard deduction is $29,200, so effectively only $30k of taxable income. Of that, 23k is taxed at 10%, 7k @ 12%, or $3.14k/10.5% effective. Then $1.6k/kid gets subtracted due to the Child Tax Credit, for a net -$700 in taxes paid. Keep in mind the cost of living in the USA is higher than many other countries. 60k for a family of four is doable in most places, but it is n…

-$70, not -$700, assuming the rest of your numbers are correct

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

#94

Post by wredue »

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.

>I cannot fathom why it is still done this way

*intuit has left the chat

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

#95

Post by bedobi »

RiceRichardJ wrote: post #54
Barrin92 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Swedish views on privacy don’t necessarily apply outside of Sweden. Are income levels not deserving of privacy?

Is your address? Your ssn? Your phone number? In Sweden, anyone can look it up.

https://ratsit.se

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

#96

Post by oivey »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #73
nathanappere wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So for you it's the same than being paid by a private corporation?

It's a conflict of interest.

More or less of a conflict of interest than members of Congress lowering their own taxes?

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

#97

Post by __s »

thegrim33 wrote: post #14
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.

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…

The two aren't really related. A implies B does not mean B implies A, ie negating B won't negate A, ie not having automatic tax filing won't remove the loss of privacy

Might as well say "Maybe instead of changing the way we file taxes, we solve world hunger"

(I say this while voting for small government & making efforts to preserve my privacy)

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

#98

Post by bigstrat2003 »

One thing that the article didn't mention, which I think needs to be considered, is the savings if we can get rid of paper tax forms. Right now, the IRS has to have the staff to be able to process those. How much will they save there, and does it offset the ongoing costs of running the website?

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

#99

Post by neltnerb »

nkrisc wrote: post #81
sbrother wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see doing this for a nanny, but surely no one is jumping through all these hoops for ad-hoc, hourly babysitting? Any of the random highschoolers or college kids I've used would look at me like I was crazy if I tried to set them up on payroll lol.

It depends on if your yearly payments to them exceed some threshold. There may be more to it than that, of course. Don’t listen to me, I’m the idiot who couldn’t figure it out.

Gotcha, thanks for the explanation. Sounds like too much hassle to DIY for sure, I guess their classification logic makes sense.

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

#100

Post by nkrisc »

neltnerb wrote: post #32
nkrisc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing how much of an idiot I felt like when we hired a babysitter for two days a week for about a year and then it came time to do things properly regarding taxes and her wages. I understand why it’s important to do it properly (for the employee’s benefit) but when I tried to look into what we had to do, as technically her employer, and it was nearly impossible for me to figure out what we had to do and then h…

Out of curiosity, what made it difficult? Not knowing what was required for sure? Figuring out how to fill out the 1099-MISC? Knowing how to file it with the IRS/state? I remember it being a bit tricky at first but once I knew the right form it only took a few minutes. The hard part for me is keeping track of rule changes. Payroll service works though =)

No 1099, it needed to be a W2.

What made it difficult was: finding out we needed to do anything at all, finding out what that “anything” even was, finding instructions for doing it, parsing the instructions and figuring out if we were reading the correct instructions, figuring out if the various exceptions and other special clauses applied, researching those, then figuring out how to actually do any of this, and so on, and then again a second time for state taxes.

Nevermind going down the rabbit whole of trying to figure out if we need an EIN and then repeating the same discovery and learning process for just that small part of the whole entire thing.

Honestly it would have been a full time job for me to successfully navigate it all. I don’t see how it’s possible to do without already being a CPA or accountant of some sort. It’s an entire domain of knowledge and I had almost none of that knowledge. There’s too much else going on in my life to begin to delve into all that.

All this for a baby sitter 16 hours a week.

Post reply on HN