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Funny thing, apparently if you don’t live in the US, the tax authority sends you a tax form all filled out, and you can just sign it and agree to the taxes they figured for you. Only in the US are you required to do your own taxes.
Apparently H&R Block and Intuit (Turbotax) and friends pay congress a lot of money to make sure Americans still have to fill out tax forms, since we will pay someone else to do it for us. The IRS has had the ability to figure your taxes and send you a form to sign for over 15 years…They just are not allowed to do it for us.
Um, not sure where you are, butt down here, we have to do our own taxes as well
If you read what he stated, outside the US, down south is not ouside
‘Down here’ is in the South Pacific, next door to Oz
“Next door to Oz”? That can’t be New Zealand. I live there and haven’t filled out a tax form in my life. Every few years I call up the IRS and they happily and without charge help me to claim anything that I might have overpaid in the previous decade. It usually comes to a few hundred dollars.
Haven’t had to file an income tax return in… over thirty years, back then we did have to fill it in ourselves
Guess things have changed since then
The reason we fill out our own has nothing to do with the industry that has formed around taxes. The industry formed because our tax code is so complex and convoluted that it is difficult for the average citizen to work through the ins and outs of the whole thing. And every year some stuff changes. Most people are unaware of just how much of the tax code originated to let the wealth pay little to nothing in the way of income taxes.
Actually, Aaron is correct. The IRS already has all the information it needs to calculate your taxes.
https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-free-simple-hr-block-intuit-lobbying-against-it
Unless you want to claim deductions. All the standard info is recorded and sent in, but not all non-standard or any out- of- pocket deductions. There are also situations that require unrelated qualifiers that wouldn’t be sent in because the qualifier wasn’t recorded by the people with the info (a vet, earning less than $x, that spent more than $y on z. The person that knows about the $y on z doesn’t know about the vet status or income qualifications)
Oh they would be happy to figure out your taxes for you. The problem is that the IRS hires “C”average students who would have a hard time getting work otherwise, treat them like a family whose patriotic duty is to get every penny of money they can because they are positive that every American cheats on their taxes and makes money under the table. This means they will take the amount of money they are told you made calculate how much the believe it costs you to live and assume that you made more than what was reported. They also assume that your average man on the street is incapable of saving any of their paychecks against future expenses. You’d fair better going to the nearest predator and having them take a pound of flesh.
Yeah… that’s not the reason at all.
H&R Block and Turbotax have a contract with the US government that they can’t offer return-free-filing so long as their monopoly on “free tax filing” (which is about as free as pay-to-win gaming) exists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj4anUL-LvY
Just because the industry lobbies to keep the job they have does not mean that they put the rules that give them their industry in place. Unless you’ve attempted to work your way through the convoluted mess that is the US Tax Code (and prepare to also reference the legal definition of m9st of the words, because they don’t always mean what the Oxford or Merriam-Webster dictionaries define them as) you really can’t get an idea of just how much your average person is not supposed to understand the system. Worse yet, it changes so frequently that tax preparers have to take new classes in the process every year (and now software has to be updated every year.) And the really scare thing is that the complexity started out that way to hide some very devious plans to keep a wealth class system going.
Short version: the code was oringinally written by a wealthy man to keep his wealth while making it difficult for the average person to match that wealth.
This article shows some of just how complicated it all is and why an entire industry and massive number of jobs depend on it not being simplified.
https://taxfoundation.org/how-many-words-are-tax-code/