Comment by bix6
5 days ago
Is it not in the governments interest to implement the cheapest, best system to enable all citizens to easily pay taxes? The IRS knows basic taxes better than anyone so certainly they are the most equipped to handle this program instead of the private sector?
Unfortunately, private sector has a say in this as well UA lobbying. Intuit and H&R Block spend millions a year [1] in lobbying to protect their business, at the expense of the American people.
[1] https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/turbotaxs-intuit-spent-re...
It is in the interest of turbotax et al. shareholders and politicians who receive funding from their lobbyists.
There is a giant and still ever-widening gap between what is in the best interest of the government* and what is in the best interest of elected officials and the wealthy special interests that fund them.
(* which should theoretically be indistinguishable from what is in the best interest of the people)
I, a Dane, have literally never filed a tax return in my life. It's completely automatic. I get a letter every year (electronically) and unless I have corrections to the pre-filled numbers, I do nothing. Manually filing tax returns is something people did in the 80's.
I thought you guys were supposed to be tech pioneers or something.
Brit here, we have tax taken from gross pay automatically (Pay As You Earn, PAYE) for most people unless they are self-employed.
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax/how-you-pay-income-tax
When I was self-employed for a shortish period, I went for an assessment interview. The HMRC bod spent most of the 20 minutes trying to find expenses I could claim tax relief on. There wasn't much (working at home, using my own laptop, writing teaching materials based on existing knowledge &c).
We have automatic deductions on paychecks too, the problem is the complicated system of deductions and the way capital gains are handled that we have to apply after that.
Trump and Republicans actually simplified it a lot with their temporary tax changes that boosted up the "standard deduction" that everyone can take at the cost of nerfing a bunch of "itemized deductions" that are more likely to apply to people in blue states (state tax deductions, property tax deductions) with the sneaky provision that the boost to the standard deduction would expire when he was no longer in office in order to make the bill "tax neutral" and let them pass it through budget reconciliation.
Which is nuts, but has actually made filing taxes much simpler and closer to what it should be for some time.
I set up an electric utility account online. Later, I get a bill from them, that has my name misspelled. I use as hell did not misspell my name like that. In the back office somewhere they are employing people who read text from one application and type it in another.
The US is stuck in time somewhere along the 70-90s.
>The US is stuck in time somewhere along the 70-90s.
Don't be too sad. The 90's were a great time. I wish I could go back.
I'm convinced a bunch of things like this, which create expense and nickel-and-diming and wasted time for tons and tons of ordinary people, are why the US feels a lot poorer than it is on paper.
Like, Intuit and Turbotax contribute to GDP but their existence, at least at the size they are and in some of their roles, is purely a drag on QOL.
(of course, the biggest part of this is the healthcare system, which is great at making sick people and their families, not to mention HR folks and such, waste tens to hundreds of hours on things that aren't about healthcare itself at all, while also costing far more than it ought to—but there are lots of other things like this, see also the tipping-culture thread today, it's all part of that, little bits of bullshit that make life worse)
Is it that easy for small business owners too?
In the USA if you have a small business, with a few shareholders, it's an absolute nightmare.
I know a few people in Ireland with micro businesses; a lot of them would file themselves on the revenue service's website. Some would pay an accountant. They do need to file, though, unlike most PAYE workers (ie normal employees).
You still need to do some kind of yearly accounts for your business. And you will most likely need an accountant for that. But the actual tax filing is fairly simply.
Couldn't tell you, since I'm a wage slave. But I hear Denmark is quite small business friendly, despite us being taxed up the arse.
Many countries have been working for decades on improving their societies, systems and quality of life.
The US has been boosting its GDP to the benefit of the rich while not improving a damn thing for regular people.
What browser do you, as a Dane, use to electronically file? I assume something very advanced Danish-built?
Yes indeed! Chrome (through Vivaldi). The technical lead and chief architect of the V8 JavaScript engine was a dane (Lars Bak).
Any browser, its just a web app.
> I thought you guys were supposed to be tech pioneers or something.
Lol thank you for the laugh
It is, but it is in individual politician's interest to take lobbying dollars from Intuit, who wants to keep gouging us
Many private interests want taxes to be inefficient and painful so they can lobby for lower taxes
And ironically, those same interests don't usually lower either middle-class tax rates nor the required complexity of the returns themselves! They just farm annoyance by making "IRS" a dirty word, and harvest it by some combination of imposing austerity on the IRS to make tax cheating by rich people less risky, and policy changes that just happen to benefit a class of people that excludes the bottom 80%.
Yes, in a world where the government is run by a benevolent public servant. But we now have a fascist Republican government run by a rapist fraudster intent on pillaging whatever is left of America.
Ah, high quality HN discussion
Ah, good comment
You presume that the people in charge have the best interests of the government in mind when they make their decisions.
GOP congresspeople have argued it's good to make it harder to pay taxes, that will make people pay less taxes, which is "starving the beast", which is good.
well, also it means that you can arbitrarily prosecute people, and it means Intuit etc will just give you, as a congressperson, bribes.