this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
304 points (96.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43968 readers
1056 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Filing taxes in the US is a cruel and byzantine process. It's fucked that the government has the resources and really the infrastructure to know what people owe, and will go through with finding out from time to time to determine if people are cheating, but all but requires them to use a private service to figure out what they owe first.
If all your income is from wages (like most people) the IRS already knows what you made cause your employer had to file w2 forms and withhold taxes. You just have to fill out a bunch of forms and hope youre right! Sometimes they fuck over waiters and stuff cause they get a lot of tips and don't always claim their tips, which is just so shitty.
blame turbotax and their peers. we should have had an electronic filing system a decade ago. but special interests said naw, fuck that.
That's a weird take indeed. In Belgium, and a lot of other countries, you file your income and file what you think is deductable drop your income as costs or benefits and then the government calculates what you owe. Last few years they had it all figured out and the only thing I had to do was check if the figure they had were correct and sign. Filing taxes took me less than 10 minutes. On the other hand, we are paying more taxes than most of the countries in the world.