Comment by 2b3a51
5 days ago
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.