Taxes in the US are unnecessarily stressful. I remember going to H&R Block and being sent home to find some piece of supporting documentation because it was “really important”. I turned the whole apartment upside down but wasn’t able to find it. Went back to the tax preparer in a state of high anxiety. When I asked what would happen if I couldn’t find the document and was told the impact on the final assessment could be as high as $80. Would have gladly spent 10x that to avoid the stress.
This is by design. Income tax filing is a long-solved problem in much of the first world.
One of the easiest ways to convince the public that the government is inept and wasteful is to make it as difficult to do the necessary as possible. If politicians cared, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Basically nothing is going to happen to you if you make a best effort. So many people focus on getting it correct and pay hundreds or thousands to do so. I've filed my taxes incorrectly by accident for years and the IRS just sends me a correction and the new amount
Politicians do care. Unfortunately, the ones who care are the ones who want taxes to be painful and complicated, to benefit the TurboTax lobby and/or to keep people constantly viscerally aware that they're paying taxes at all.
It's to H&R Block's benefit to make you feel that taxes are stressful and you need 3rd party help, though. That you were stressed out about this interaction is H&R's fault; not the law or the IRS.
> It's to H&R Block's benefit to make you feel that taxes are stressful and you need 3rd party help, though. That you were stressed out about this interaction is H&R's fault; not the law or the IRS.
H&R has lobbyists to ensure taxes are complicated and stressful.
H&R Block isn’t exactly the top tier accounting option. Not sure what you were expecting. It’s like going to McDonald’s and being disappointed at the food quality.
I'm not joking, in Australia the tax "filing" takes like 2 mins, you literally go, next, next, look at the details, "yep looks correct" put in your claims, and then submit.
You are all done.
Unless you have something wack going on its not even a process. I have had signups which are more complicated then it.
American taxes on the other hand mega suck, and have 9000 pitfalls.
Finland doesn't even ask you to approve. They send you a suggestion and if you do not amend it by deadline they take it as it is.
And amending is online form where everything is clearly explained, links to documentation. And longest time it takes is actually to look up numbers from your own records.
In the US, property tax typically works that way for many people. You get something in the mail that says this is what your tax will be. If you happen to have a loan for your house, the bank in charge of your loan handles it.
The only opposing political argument I've heard is that if income taxes were this simple, many people would be overpaying. I think that argument has many obvious flaws. Unfortunately few US citizens demand anything of their politicians on this topic or other topics that would dramatically improve their lives. Instead they care more about vanity topics that don't even effect them.
> the impact on the final assessment could be as high as $80
That's the financial impact. Depending on what you're missing, the nonfinancial might be opening yourself to perjury, because you're knowingly claiming a falsehood as a fact on a tax return (even if it's financially in the government's benefit)... never mind potentially screwing up future tax returns in the process.
This is the result of decades of Republican lobbying, legislation and outright sabotage. The philosophy, openly advertised by Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, goes like this: nobody likes taxes. So if people find the filing process difficult and stressful every year, they will be constantly reminded of this fact. This will in turn make them more open to suggestions and propaganda along the lines of taxes being something that must be fought tooth and nail at every turn, because let's face it, who wants the tax code to become even more complex?
In contrast, if the process is streamlined every year, most people won't even pay attention to how much they pay in taxes - which isn't great if your ultimate goal is to keep government as small as possible.
The ease in which you can get away with these tactics ad infinitum is starting to make me a pessimist. It feels like it takes almost an entire population of unified people, that are diligently advocating on behalf of themselves, to compete with a ruling class that has the resources to stay on the offense forever.
The ruling class doesn't even have to actively communicate and conspire with one another (although they do). Their independent attempts to undermine and control government furthers the agenda of all private businesses.
It would help if Americans educated themselves on the basics of taxes. They would realize quickly how W-2 income employees pay a very high tax rate when you factor in FICA vs high wealth individuals who pay little to no FICA or income taxes. Add in the benefit of compound interest, cheap margin loans, and you have an incredibly unfair system. It's also why many wealthy individuals argue for a "smaller" government & less taxes. They travel private, go to private schools & prefer to avoid anything "public".
All this is with just the very basics, not counting step up basis, trusts or anything slightly complicated.
The IRS Direct File was shut down by the current administration. And no, it was way more effort than what two interns could do. https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file
I've had the IRS reach out to me several times, each time it's a letter explaining their position and I responded and we went back and forth a few times and it was over.
This is insane to me. Not only is the US tax code so complex you need a specialist to help you fill in the tax return but those specialists apparently also have a justified expectation of income and thus can’t be replaced by a freaking web app. Let alone a pre-filled one. I spend 15-20 minutes on my tax return in Estonia and only take that long, because I have some savings in places that do not do the reporting for me. The refund appears on my bank account usually within a few days. We are not the most capable country nor have the best engineers (hello, I’m the former CIO of Estonian Tax and Customs). We don’t have mountains of money either. And yet, here is a solution (and has been for 20+ years by now), that’s two orders of magnitude better, than the solution used by the leading country of the free world. Just why?
Sounds like a very good idea. I never got a math error notice but I've gotten a few that were fundamentally a case of transposed digits--and it was not one bit clear. You didn't report interest from ABC--but looking at my return it clearly shows interest from ABC. It would have been much easier if they said their files show more interest from ABC than you are reporting.
This is a rhetorical sleight of hand; almost everyone pays FICA taxes at some point in their life, and of course there are other taxes than Federal income tax.
Is it? The article is exclusively about federal income tax - spefically the variable part that you have to calculate yourself, not the constant % that's automatically withheld from your paycheck (FICA).
Unfortunately, the IRS built DirectFile to enable free filing and the current admin killed it. Maybe we’ll get it back in three years after regime change.
I like one of the memes online that describe filing tax as you’re taking a test that the government knows the answer to, and if answer the questions wrong, you go to jail.
It's a bizarrely simpleminded and incorrect meme, then.
The government doesn't know the exact answer - if they did we wouldn't have to file at all. Have a kid? Buy a house? Go to college? Make $60k selling illicit drugs on the black market? Get a $200 bank signup bonus? These all affect taxes. One could argue in a dystopian way that technically "the government" as a whole does know these things, but suffice to say, the IRS doesn't, necessarily.
The whole point of filing is that our tax code is ridiculous. We shouldn't get mad at filing, but at our ridiculous tax code. But it'll never be fixed, there's way too much pork stuffed in it from both sides.
Also, nobody files 100% correct taxes. Show me the person, I'll show you the crime(so to speak). You do not go to prison for making mistakes!
America has famously bad government everything. Everything they touch becomes a jobs program for the least qualified. Every comedian jokes about the DMV and TSA because they're the ones most people deal with regularly, but it's depressing to realize every government run institution is just as if not more bizarre. My interactions with USCIS and DHS, who I thought would be more professional, made me question if I was on a hidden comedy show...
My favorite interaction to tell however belongs to the TSA. I went through the scanner and it flagged the back of my head. The TSA agent said he needed to verify, so put on gloves and patted the back of my head before letting me go. I wear a military cut, the back of my head is done with a #1/2 guard. For those not in the US, that's a buzz cut of length 1.5mm.
Tax should be something that must be standard, simple, educated from a young age. But somehow miraculously it still becomes full of pressure in any country.
I guess we're pigeonholing the end of direct file already in less than a year. The article doesn't even mention it.
Having seen their work before, wakeuptopolitics is a sort of fetishist for appearing unbiased or centrist so they won't bother calling out "one side" in order to appear to be enlightened and above the fray at the expense of the truth. While Democrats also get money from turbo tax et al., it was Trump who ended it likely just to spite Joe Biden, in his usual manner.
You just aren't appreciating just _how_ majestically bonkers the US tax system is. It is truly a work of art.
For a country which loves complaining about tax, and where half the political campaigning was traditionally about lowering tax, they sure love overcomplicating tax.
As a Spanish guy living in Japan, I find the Japanese system hugely complicated (or better said, antiquated), so I shudder to think how bad the American system might be...
> to accurately prepopulate tax returns for around 45% of Americans. (Those other countries have much simpler tax codes than we do.)
One should note that the cited study quotes the 45% from a 1992 study. These days, with gig economy and quasi-self-employment, that number is probably higher since you don't have an employer who reports your income for you.
Still, here in Australia, where we have the return-free tax system, adding what you earned from your various gig jobs isn't too hard: you add that as items to the web form: 'I made 15,123 from Uber Eats'. That just gets added to your overall return. I don't see how that's so hard compared to the US?
Income reporting is not the problem: Anyone paying you any significant amount of money is required to file with the IRS, including if you’re paying yourself.
The issue is the broad range of deductions and credits that depend on things like the composition of your household and your primary residence. Contra some expectations, the IRS does not keep a database of who’s shacking up with whom, where, or if kids are in the picture.
In the states if you are a contractor there are tons of things that you can deduct from your taxable income. So “figuring out how much you should be taxed” is after those deductions.
If uber paid you $15123 but you:
Just bought a new bike bc your other was stolen
You paid $1200 for insurance
You bought a helmet and cold weather clothes etc etc.
I think that's common in most places. What's different in the US is that the IRS forces you to proactively provide a lot more information about it, though. I have a rental property and need to enter the same information about the same income and expenses on three different forms, breaking it down in different ways. It's tedious and error-prone, and I guess the philosophy is that it's easier to spot fraud if the numbers on all the different forms don't add up to a coherent story.
Other countries presumably rely on other fraud signals. They might have more visibility into your day-to-day financial transactions, or there might be more of a culture of leaving an anonymous tip if you suspect your neighbor isn't paying a fair share.
Yes, same in Australia. Keep receipts and add the cost to the web form.
They have simplified it nicely, though: if you work from home you can claim a per-hour deduction so you don't have to do the math of wear-and-tear, electricity, internet etc. I think it was $0.6 per hour?
Finland did that even simpler more than 50% of work days you get 750€. Ofc, hard part is to calculate 50% of your internet bill. And then any technology you buy for remote work. Not chair, desk or lamps though, those are in the room part...
Thankfully(\s), they are simplifying it even further next year and removing whole thing. Now you only get to deduct money if you actually rent an office...
Taxes in the US are unnecessarily stressful. I remember going to H&R Block and being sent home to find some piece of supporting documentation because it was “really important”. I turned the whole apartment upside down but wasn’t able to find it. Went back to the tax preparer in a state of high anxiety. When I asked what would happen if I couldn’t find the document and was told the impact on the final assessment could be as high as $80. Would have gladly spent 10x that to avoid the stress.
This is by design. Income tax filing is a long-solved problem in much of the first world.
One of the easiest ways to convince the public that the government is inept and wasteful is to make it as difficult to do the necessary as possible. If politicians cared, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Basically nothing is going to happen to you if you make a best effort. So many people focus on getting it correct and pay hundreds or thousands to do so. I've filed my taxes incorrectly by accident for years and the IRS just sends me a correction and the new amount
I found myself in a weird corner of tax filing because I did equity crowdfunding (startup investing in amounts probably smaller than worth it.)
This results in a lot of K-1s, which tax preparers charge you like $500 a form for, except all of mine had values like $2.
Luckily you just kind of do it halfway right in TurboTax and it works out.
Politicians do care. Unfortunately, the ones who care are the ones who want taxes to be painful and complicated, to benefit the TurboTax lobby and/or to keep people constantly viscerally aware that they're paying taxes at all.
It's to H&R Block's benefit to make you feel that taxes are stressful and you need 3rd party help, though. That you were stressed out about this interaction is H&R's fault; not the law or the IRS.
> It's to H&R Block's benefit to make you feel that taxes are stressful and you need 3rd party help, though. That you were stressed out about this interaction is H&R's fault; not the law or the IRS.
H&R has lobbyists to ensure taxes are complicated and stressful.
There is shared blame here.
H&R Block isn’t exactly the top tier accounting option. Not sure what you were expecting. It’s like going to McDonald’s and being disappointed at the food quality.
The average American shouldn't need top tier accounting to file their taxes.
The average American can file for free, or at least it was possible in the past.
They could also learn to file their taxes, as well as simple tax planning, in a very short video.
I'm not joking, in Australia the tax "filing" takes like 2 mins, you literally go, next, next, look at the details, "yep looks correct" put in your claims, and then submit.
You are all done.
Unless you have something wack going on its not even a process. I have had signups which are more complicated then it.
American taxes on the other hand mega suck, and have 9000 pitfalls.
Finland doesn't even ask you to approve. They send you a suggestion and if you do not amend it by deadline they take it as it is.
And amending is online form where everything is clearly explained, links to documentation. And longest time it takes is actually to look up numbers from your own records.
In the US, property tax typically works that way for many people. You get something in the mail that says this is what your tax will be. If you happen to have a loan for your house, the bank in charge of your loan handles it.
The only opposing political argument I've heard is that if income taxes were this simple, many people would be overpaying. I think that argument has many obvious flaws. Unfortunately few US citizens demand anything of their politicians on this topic or other topics that would dramatically improve their lives. Instead they care more about vanity topics that don't even effect them.
> the impact on the final assessment could be as high as $80
That's the financial impact. Depending on what you're missing, the nonfinancial might be opening yourself to perjury, because you're knowingly claiming a falsehood as a fact on a tax return (even if it's financially in the government's benefit)... never mind potentially screwing up future tax returns in the process.
Tax returns are best effort. It's much less of a crime to get one wrong than people think it is.
This is the result of decades of Republican lobbying, legislation and outright sabotage. The philosophy, openly advertised by Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, goes like this: nobody likes taxes. So if people find the filing process difficult and stressful every year, they will be constantly reminded of this fact. This will in turn make them more open to suggestions and propaganda along the lines of taxes being something that must be fought tooth and nail at every turn, because let's face it, who wants the tax code to become even more complex?
In contrast, if the process is streamlined every year, most people won't even pay attention to how much they pay in taxes - which isn't great if your ultimate goal is to keep government as small as possible.
The ease in which you can get away with these tactics ad infinitum is starting to make me a pessimist. It feels like it takes almost an entire population of unified people, that are diligently advocating on behalf of themselves, to compete with a ruling class that has the resources to stay on the offense forever.
The ruling class doesn't even have to actively communicate and conspire with one another (although they do). Their independent attempts to undermine and control government furthers the agenda of all private businesses.
It would help if Americans educated themselves on the basics of taxes. They would realize quickly how W-2 income employees pay a very high tax rate when you factor in FICA vs high wealth individuals who pay little to no FICA or income taxes. Add in the benefit of compound interest, cheap margin loans, and you have an incredibly unfair system. It's also why many wealthy individuals argue for a "smaller" government & less taxes. They travel private, go to private schools & prefer to avoid anything "public".
All this is with just the very basics, not counting step up basis, trusts or anything slightly complicated.
Dare one ask where all of the AI proponents are when the subjects of public budgeting and taxation arise?
IRS should create a spreadsheet with irs forms so the user types in their numbers and the calculations are automatic.
An intern or 2 could do this for the entire nation to benefit!
The IRS Direct File was shut down by the current administration. And no, it was way more effort than what two interns could do. https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file
Is this law... necessary?
Are people going to jail for a math error?
I've had the IRS reach out to me several times, each time it's a letter explaining their position and I responded and we went back and forth a few times and it was over.
No police showed up...
This is insane to me. Not only is the US tax code so complex you need a specialist to help you fill in the tax return but those specialists apparently also have a justified expectation of income and thus can’t be replaced by a freaking web app. Let alone a pre-filled one. I spend 15-20 minutes on my tax return in Estonia and only take that long, because I have some savings in places that do not do the reporting for me. The refund appears on my bank account usually within a few days. We are not the most capable country nor have the best engineers (hello, I’m the former CIO of Estonian Tax and Customs). We don’t have mountains of money either. And yet, here is a solution (and has been for 20+ years by now), that’s two orders of magnitude better, than the solution used by the leading country of the free world. Just why?
California sent me a notice I screwed up and owed an extra $100 or so. Didn't really explain it, but I paid and they never bothered me again.
I paid on the actual official website, did not get scammed BTW...
H.R.998 - Internal Revenue Service Math and Taxpayer Help Act - https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/998
Sounds like a very good idea. I never got a math error notice but I've gotten a few that were fundamentally a case of transposed digits--and it was not one bit clear. You didn't report interest from ABC--but looking at my return it clearly shows interest from ABC. It would have been much easier if they said their files show more interest from ABC than you are reporting.
Pedantry: the article claims "Paying taxes is a universal experience", but only 60.4% (2024) of American households pay income tax.
This is a rhetorical sleight of hand; almost everyone pays FICA taxes at some point in their life, and of course there are other taxes than Federal income tax.
Is it? The article is exclusively about federal income tax - spefically the variable part that you have to calculate yourself, not the constant % that's automatically withheld from your paycheck (FICA).
A large majority have to file though, even if they don't owe any taxes. It's still a pain in the ass.
Unfortunately, the IRS built DirectFile to enable free filing and the current admin killed it. Maybe we’ll get it back in three years after regime change.
https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I like one of the memes online that describe filing tax as you’re taking a test that the government knows the answer to, and if answer the questions wrong, you go to jail.
That's not accurate, the government doesn't know how you're going to file, deductions, quite a few details.
It's a bizarrely simpleminded and incorrect meme, then.
The government doesn't know the exact answer - if they did we wouldn't have to file at all. Have a kid? Buy a house? Go to college? Make $60k selling illicit drugs on the black market? Get a $200 bank signup bonus? These all affect taxes. One could argue in a dystopian way that technically "the government" as a whole does know these things, but suffice to say, the IRS doesn't, necessarily.
The whole point of filing is that our tax code is ridiculous. We shouldn't get mad at filing, but at our ridiculous tax code. But it'll never be fixed, there's way too much pork stuffed in it from both sides.
Also, nobody files 100% correct taxes. Show me the person, I'll show you the crime(so to speak). You do not go to prison for making mistakes!
> Have a kid? Buy a house? Go to college? Make $60k selling illicit drugs on the black market? Get a $200 bank signup bonus?
Lmao in Australia, other then the drugs, yes the government knows because everything is reported to them.
America is just behind.
America has famously bad government everything. Everything they touch becomes a jobs program for the least qualified. Every comedian jokes about the DMV and TSA because they're the ones most people deal with regularly, but it's depressing to realize every government run institution is just as if not more bizarre. My interactions with USCIS and DHS, who I thought would be more professional, made me question if I was on a hidden comedy show...
My favorite interaction to tell however belongs to the TSA. I went through the scanner and it flagged the back of my head. The TSA agent said he needed to verify, so put on gloves and patted the back of my head before letting me go. I wear a military cut, the back of my head is done with a #1/2 guard. For those not in the US, that's a buzz cut of length 1.5mm.
If you're a business owner then they're not going to just know because it's up to you in several different ways how to report things.
If you're a child then they're not going to just know who you're a dependent of.
People say this, but it's wrong. If you made an honest attempt and get it wrong, you might pay a fine. You have to deliberately lie to go to jail.
Tax should be something that must be standard, simple, educated from a young age. But somehow miraculously it still becomes full of pressure in any country.
I guess we're pigeonholing the end of direct file already in less than a year. The article doesn't even mention it.
Having seen their work before, wakeuptopolitics is a sort of fetishist for appearing unbiased or centrist so they won't bother calling out "one side" in order to appear to be enlightened and above the fray at the expense of the truth. While Democrats also get money from turbo tax et al., it was Trump who ended it likely just to spite Joe Biden, in his usual manner.
> Those other countries have much simpler tax codes than we do
All German readers spew out their drink in disbelief - Pardon what?
You just aren't appreciating just _how_ majestically bonkers the US tax system is. It is truly a work of art.
For a country which loves complaining about tax, and where half the political campaigning was traditionally about lowering tax, they sure love overcomplicating tax.
The German word for how complicated the tax code is is "die Steuerverfassungskomplexität"
I think you're vastly under estimating how complicated the us tax code is.
I have no idea about tha US tax code. An explanation would be welcome.
Was Germany one of the listed countries?
Yes.
> United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, among other countries.
As a Spanish guy living in Japan, I find the Japanese system hugely complicated (or better said, antiquated), so I shudder to think how bad the American system might be...
> to accurately prepopulate tax returns for around 45% of Americans. (Those other countries have much simpler tax codes than we do.)
One should note that the cited study quotes the 45% from a 1992 study. These days, with gig economy and quasi-self-employment, that number is probably higher since you don't have an employer who reports your income for you.
Still, here in Australia, where we have the return-free tax system, adding what you earned from your various gig jobs isn't too hard: you add that as items to the web form: 'I made 15,123 from Uber Eats'. That just gets added to your overall return. I don't see how that's so hard compared to the US?
Income reporting is not the problem: Anyone paying you any significant amount of money is required to file with the IRS, including if you’re paying yourself.
The issue is the broad range of deductions and credits that depend on things like the composition of your household and your primary residence. Contra some expectations, the IRS does not keep a database of who’s shacking up with whom, where, or if kids are in the picture.
In the states if you are a contractor there are tons of things that you can deduct from your taxable income. So “figuring out how much you should be taxed” is after those deductions.
If uber paid you $15123 but you:
Just bought a new bike bc your other was stolen
You paid $1200 for insurance
You bought a helmet and cold weather clothes etc etc.
Those things reduce your taxable income.
I think that's common in most places. What's different in the US is that the IRS forces you to proactively provide a lot more information about it, though. I have a rental property and need to enter the same information about the same income and expenses on three different forms, breaking it down in different ways. It's tedious and error-prone, and I guess the philosophy is that it's easier to spot fraud if the numbers on all the different forms don't add up to a coherent story.
Other countries presumably rely on other fraud signals. They might have more visibility into your day-to-day financial transactions, or there might be more of a culture of leaving an anonymous tip if you suspect your neighbor isn't paying a fair share.
What three forms are you talking about?
4562, 8825, 1065
Yes, same in Australia. Keep receipts and add the cost to the web form.
They have simplified it nicely, though: if you work from home you can claim a per-hour deduction so you don't have to do the math of wear-and-tear, electricity, internet etc. I think it was $0.6 per hour?
Finland did that even simpler more than 50% of work days you get 750€. Ofc, hard part is to calculate 50% of your internet bill. And then any technology you buy for remote work. Not chair, desk or lamps though, those are in the room part...
Thankfully(\s), they are simplifying it even further next year and removing whole thing. Now you only get to deduct money if you actually rent an office...