Doubt there is one. The hard truth is that most Americans’ taxes are pretty simple and straightforward. We can stop pretending that copying some boxes from a W2 and a 1099 is difficult.
I mean, personally I wish we’d stop pretending that the IRS isn’t already fully aware of what you owe and could just do the filling for you, like in other countries, but until Grover Norquist fucks off forever we’re stuck where we are.
Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.
The argument has been since free filing means only the wealthy will hire accountants, free filing would discriminate against the poor given a few mistakes will be made here and there.
I may not need to mention that disingenuous argument is made by the pirates at Intuit and their lobbyists.
free filing would discriminate against the poor
As opposed to the current system where the richest among us can hire a whole team of accountants to find every deduction possible?
Holy Christ someone using disingenuous appropriately, I’d almost given up on the word. Thanks for saving it!
They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about
Solo 401ks/IRA also wouldn’t be something they know about until you file if I understand correctly. Guess you could that expenses?
They should (and do?) have the same information your employer, bank, or brokerage files. i.e. the same forms you use to fill out your taxes now. They know what you contributed to you 401k and your other retirement accounts.
I understand why we do out taxes in the current situation, kinda. If the irs just sent you a bill it would be ripe for people thinking they were getting ripped off. People hating taxes and thinking they’re getting robbed is about as American as it gets. The whole boston tea party thing. People on both side doing the math holds people accountable. Also the current tax bracket situation kinda needs some end of the year math. Now, if it was a flat tax, a fixed percent… THAT EVERYONE pays no matter how much you make then it would be easy math. But they gotta make sure the middle class is paying 22% of their income to the feds and the billionaires pay one tenth of a percent… you know… for reasons. Then there are a billion write-offs and loopholes the rich can exploit, so they gotta keep those there.
If it was, say, 5% for everyone, no matter what you make, then it could easily just come out of your check as you get paid with no bs at the end of the year.
Now, if it was a flat tax, a fixed percent…But they gotta make sure the middle class is paying 22% of their income to the feds and the billionaires pay one tenth of a percent… you know… for reasons.
I fall into the lower end of the middle class (nationally) and my income tax is about 11%, but on top of that, after deductions and credits I end up deducting myself into the lowest tax bracket and collecting credits so I get a nice chunk back every year. To actually pay a full 22% of your income in income taxes, you must be making pretty good bank (and probably spending pretty good bank if you’re still considering yourself middle class)
Flat taxes are extremely regressive. The whole idea of tax brackets is that those with more ability to pay pay more and those with less ability to pay pay less. If you only make 22k/year you need all of that and that $2200 can be pretty lifechanging, but if you make 220k per year you can live without that $22k. There’s also fun stuff with how much tax revenue the government can actually bring in depending on who they tax harder, and generally it favors taxing the rich at a much higher percentage rate than they do the poor.
I’ve been in the US for a few years now. All my colleagues told me that doing taxes is hard. So I used to reluctantly pay money to do it through Sprintax. This year, I decided to do it by hand. It took almost the same amount of time as it would’ve taken to do it through Sprintax, which is around 30 minutes.
In italy the data is pre-filled, you just have to check if there’s something missing and you’re good to go, but you still have to send the module manually, like going into the website and doing the stuff.
It should be all automatic, wtf
Don’t they just assume that everything is good if you don’t reply? Works that way here
It’s not a “reply”, it’s a thing that you have to do, so that if you owe the government something you’d pay it, elsa you’ll receive money if the government owes you something (for example, a percentage of medical expenses gets “refunded”)
step one for me is get out last year’s so i have a point of reference. just do the same thing again. numbers are a bit different, but the general ‘what-goes-where’ is usually the same–unless they split a form into multiple pages, or add an extra page to one.
once i get the new blank forms printed, it’s about 15 minutes for me to fill-out, copy, and stuff inside an envelope. this year’s added yet another sheet, i had to use a flat instead of the usual #10. cost more to mail, too, but i will not ever ‘e-file’.
one of the few perks of being poor—easy taxes.
All of those things you mentioned are edge cases which you would still be able to handle yourself if they auto filled everything for you.
I use an online tax service which scans my w2 and filles it out. It still gives me the option to edit stuff but I mostly just check to make sure things look good.