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Weird. My tax forms tell me how to fill it out. Super easy.
When you have a single income as an employee with no dependants or spouse, your taxes are dead simple. It’s when you have more things to consider that taxes get complex. If you own a small business on the side, have some kids, own a house, a wife, maybe you came into some money from an estate, also you did some contract work on 1099… That’s just normal people types of complex tax stuff. If your business does well, you can expect the adage “more money, more problems” to rear its ugly head.
It’s actually “More money, more problems. Unless you are a wealthy enough to get away with not paying taxes.”
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In the Netherlands, AFAIK (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the government tells you how much it is and you can make your own filing that contains various deductions that the government doesn’t know about that can make the amount to pay lower. The system still has a few issues here and there but it’s much better than the US, like just about anything these days
Yes, you are quite correct. Here you can file your taxes either on paper, which means you’ll have to fill out everything yourself, or you can use the website of the tax authority (Belastingdienst). In the latter case the most important stuff is usually already filled out, like your earnings, remaining mortgage & interest paid over it (which gets you a tax deduction), etc, so you’ll only need to check if the prefilled data is correct and add the stuff that the government doesn’t know about.
Bit of a correction on what you said, you not only have to add some deductions yourself (some of which are actually already filled out, like the previously mentioned mortgage interest), but also other kinds of taxable income or wealth that couldn’t be determined in advance, e.g. that bank account in a sunny country that doesn’t share data with our government.
For standard cases you can be done in 30 minutes tops, it is actually a pretty good system, and you indeed immediately get to see either what you have to pay or what you are getting back. Although you’ll need to wait for the official message from the Belastingdienst which can take a month or two. But usually that won’t differ from what you were already shown.
Also nice, if you made a mistake you can simply correct it by opening your previous filing digitally, you can adjust a filing up to 5 years ago. Depending on what you adjust do expect to have to deliver some proof, as those adjustments are checked by an employee of the Belastingdienst. The regular filings are checked randomly.
I’m so tired of paying HR Block $300/year to do my taxes, which has no tax return because I do my deductions carefully. Why can’t we have a straightforward system like the rest of the world??
I started a thread on asklemmy to find out what are alternatives to scummy tax services that lobby against the better interests of tax payers. So far Tax Free USA seems like the one with the lowest cost (free Federal, $15 State) and while they are a member of a lobby group, the group has spent a fraction of what Intuit and H&R Block has to keep our tax returns complex.
Seems if I link the thread, my comment is hidden.
Because Congress creates really, really complicated tax laws that reduce tax burdens for business losses and obviously favor a structure that if you’re wealthy enough you can exploit it for things that aren’t actually contributing to our economy. Regular person with a few deductions that might go over a standard deduction? You might want some help with that, even if you’re “doing it yourself” with the help of software (just like almost all of tax preparers do) or if you’re just doing a standard deduction, it is easy.
Why can’t you just fill out a 1040EZ in a webform and file online through the IRS?
Companies like Intuit lobby Congress so that the IRS can’t just make it easy for most people. For example, the IRS wanted to just have their own app on a website to help you do your taxes for free just like TurboTax but nope.
As an example, you can specifically blame Intuit as an example that has actively tried to limit the IRS making tax filing free and easy for most Americans.
The same thing has happened with weather in the US. NOAA/NWS pretty much provides all weather data and RADAR data to the public for free. They also provide a public API and all those weather apps either directly or indirectly get their data from there for the US.
Why don’t they have an app like all these weather services do? Well companies lobbied so NWS isn’t allowed to. The best they can do is provide a website that you can “use like an app.” Paying extra for that up-to-date RADAR feed in your weather app? Guess what? You already did through taxes and now you get to pay a private company to simply display it in their interface.
You can specifically blame AccuWeather as an example of a company that actively has tried to limit the NWS and actually lock the public out of the data that they paid for through taxes.
Congress has the power to end this non-sense but does not. I’m sure this won’t surprise anyone when I say this but US law is slanted towards empowering businesses and lowering accountability.
Turbo Tax is the reason why the government doesn’t just give you a number to pay. The process could be easy, but the giant corporation Intuit and their political lobbying is why it sucks.
TurboTax plus Republicans wanting to make paying taxes as difficult as possible so people will vote to cut taxes
rich donors want it complex so they can keep finding the loop holes that let them pay nothing most years.
The IRS is actually going test pilot such a program in a few states in the near future.
Which is why they keep wanting to defund the IRS (example):
- It allows the wealthy to cheat on their taxes with less concerns of getting audited or if they do get audited, they can outspend the auditors.
- It would have de-funded this measure the IRS is getting ready to test which would allow Americans to figure out and pay their taxes without feeling compelled to go through middle men like Intuit and TurboTax.
Edit: More direct example of point 2
After President Joe Biden’s December 2021 Executive Order instructed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to consider “expanded electronic filing options,” Yellen testified before the Senate Finance Committee that building a free direct filing service is “definitely a priority.” The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 allotted $15 million for the IRS to explore the creation of a free federal tax filing service.
In May, the IRS released a report announcing plans to launch the pilot program for the 2024 tax filing season and indicating that most U.S. taxpayers are interested in filing their taxes directly to the IRS for free.
But in June, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee proposed a budget rider that would bar the IRS from using federal government funds to create a government-run tax preparation software, unless approved by the House and Senate’s appropriations committees.
If I was a billionaire, it sure is more affordable to spend 30 million on lobbying than paying 50 million on taxes.
The IRS is actually testing a new system where they just tell you how much you owe/get, and that’s it unless there’s unreported income and such that needs to be corrected.
Also, the IRS only escalates straight to jail if it’s incredibly obvious you’re intentionally committing tax fraud. If your forms are wrong they just send you a letter to fix it.
I wish more people were aware of this. One year I made a rather significant number entry error and should have owed a couple thousand more than I paid. I got a fairly routine letter later in the year asking me to correct the error. I had a little mental panic, reran the numbers, and filed an amended return. There was no pressure, you always have payment options, and they send you back another letter confirming the acceptance of the amended file. I understand that many people would have significant problems paying extra unexpectedly but unless you are actively committing fraud you are not an immediate priority for the IRS.
And if you can’t afford to pay it all in one go, they will work with you to set up a payment plan. If you can pay it off in 6 months it’s basically a non-issue.
Link? I will instantly use it. Mostly to stick it to Intuit.
If you don’t qualify for the pilot, you can also find out what other tax filing companies do not lobby to keep taxes hard to figure out and file.
So you mainly want to avoid Intuit owned companies and H&R Block. They alone spent millions per year to lobby against easy and free filing for taxpayers.
Then there’s the ACTR (American Coalition Of Taxpayer Rights) who spend $100s of thousands a year lobbying for the same (and are made up by 14 members:
https://www.americancoalitionfortaxpayerrights.org/about/
Intuit
H&R Block
Tax Act
OnLine Taxes
Wolters Kluwer
Tax Hawk
Liberty Tax
Drake Software
Jackson Hewitt
also the following financial institutions:
Netspend
Republic Bank
TPG Santa Barbara
pathward
Edit: Started a post in /c/asklemmy to find out alternatives. Tax Act was my go-to company, but they’ve joined the ACTR at some point, so they’re a no-go.
https://lemmy.world/post/8447282
Edit 2: Checking out some older reddit threads on the subject, FreeTaxUSA may be the best option so far. FreeTaxUSA are owned by Tax Hawk which is a member of the ACTR, however of all the ones i’ve checked so far, they are the cheapest (free Federal and $15 state), and at least they’re not one of the top lobbying companies like Intuit(Turbo Tax/Credit Karma tax services), H&R Block, or Jackson Hewitt.
Meanwhile here, come tax time I get a letter and only people that have special things going on like stuff they would get subsidies for (like installing solar panels or insulating), will have to alter what the letter says. Most everyone else can ignore the letter as all their taxes have been paid in full or they get something back.
I’ve often thought it would be fun to just punch in some random numbers, send it off and say that I owe $10, pay the amount and let them figure it out … they already do anyway.
But I know that if I do, they’d probably make me pay financially or legally anyway.
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there will be fines and fees with that though.
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I have had to deal with stuff a few times and to some degree. There is definitely an incentive on the case managers to get a win and its tedius to get them to reverse it. Lots of back and forth and often times they are not taking the whole file so you have to remind them about something from like the first correspondence. I had one where I had messed up as I did not take into account gains/losses from inheritance (inheritance is not taxed but if you get stock and then sell it you have to take the difference) but the thing is it had more losses so they owed me money. After half a dozen correspondences I paid them a small amount and aired that this was just to resolve the matter and I am still actually owed money but at some point the work im doing to get the thing recotified is less than minimum wage.
I somehow forgot to do my taxes in 2011 (was a student and travelling), it took them 10 years to come at me asking about it. Now I have no access to any of that info and even if I did they’d owe me money. Their systems are slow unless you owe a lot I think.
IRS doesn’t know my deductions til I tell them. I’m certainly not rich either. I just get to write off alot.
Interesting. What deductions do you have the government doesn’t know abut? Where I pay taxes they know how many kids do I have, they how much do I make and how much money do I save for retirement. What deductions do you have in US the government doesn’t track?
Work expenses and charitable donations
Blows my mind that you have to file tax returns and stuff in America.
An account’s take on this https://youtu.be/Vu3T4ZXzOyw?si=KnAP2TEvx9WSLzno
Is it a good take?
Not really, says Australia has a good system and 45 countries at least partially do it already. The IRS will be testing a free online tool amongst a small group of filers in 2024 but none in the information will be pre populated due to limited scope of the project. He seems nice but talks really slow, rehashes content repeatedly and doesn’t even provide an answer or any kind of analysis. At the end he briefly wonders if TurboTax lobbying Congress impede progress…no shit.
He never really addressed anything in the video, it’s honestly impressive.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Vu3T4ZXzOyw?si=KnAP2TEvx9WSLzno
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You guess with a calculator and detailed instructions. Educated guess.
You do engineering with calculator and detailed instructions, educated guess. You do mechanics with detailed insturctions. You do cooking with detailed instructions. You do rocket science with calculator and detailed insturctions. Just be built diffrent ladies! It’s not THAT hard or an entire predetory industry, JEEZE FELLERS! /s
Are you suggesting that putting a number from box A into box B, and subtracting box C from box D, is as hard as rocket science???
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How it actually works is that the IRS doesn’t known how much you need to pay. You provide your income and taxes already paid throughout the year then the IRS says “yeah, looks about right for what you made” or here’s money back you paid to much or didn’t pay enough. It only gets complicated when you have huge amounts of money.
Pretty much how it works in India too.
