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xd1936

"Government: You owe us money. It’s called taxes.

Me: How much do I owe?

Gov’t: You have to figure that out.

Me: I just pay what I want?

Gov’t: Oh, no we know exactly how much you owe. But you have to guess that number too.

Me: What if I get it wrong?

Gov’t: You go to prison"

https://twitter.com/jordan_stratton/status/11181414550616719...

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You have to be pretty obviously flouting tax law to have it become a criminal case.

Apart from that, IRS workers are just like workers at any other job where throughput is a primary metric: They just want to close cases quickly with a resolution. That may mean penalties and interest rate if you screwed up or were actually trying to avoid what you owe. They're not taking you to court and prosecuting for $100k if you're working with them to fix things though. In the end, they don't much care if the settlement takes 10 years to pay off $200/month at a time as long as they can close the case as resolved.

Source: 1) I have a friend who was an IRS lawyer and then a tax attorney. 2) I know someone who went bankrupt and came to long term multi-year agreement to pay $50/month.

up to the prison part, it is largely accurate. The punishment is just more likely to be penalties and expensive audits.

My wife is currently facing a fine because she had some extra income in 2020 that the local IRS don't understand. Not that it's illegal, shady or remotely fraudulent: they just don't understand how could she earn some small money (around $500) doing X when she mainly does Y.

The "solution" they deem as legal is to create a whole new bussiness dedicated to do X, or refuse to do it. And to my eyes X and Y are related (like doing a security audit to a web and building a web), but IRS don't think so.

There's another form you can fill out for extra income... I don't know your situation but it's likely you didn't fill out that form but someone on the other side of that transaction did.

If it's basically pass-through income from a business then you fill out (in the US) a Schedule C. And you do one for each business like that. And you also have to separately fill out the medicare & social security taxes, paying both the employer and employee side of it.

It sounds complicated, but paying about $100 for the TurboTax edition that handles small businesses will make it fairly easy. Yep, they've got strong regulatory capture in this space, but business income isn't always straight forward so I would consider ~$100 well worth it. Though I'm sure that some dead-simple home businesses really wouldn't need it.

The fear people have about going to jail over taxes is not really supported by the statistics. It turns out people who work for the IRS aren't stupid and recognize it's hard to pay taxes from jail. Most people who get nailed that way knew exactly what they were doing.

PDF: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

It's a reductio ad absurdam joke

That vignette is meant to be sardonic, not realistic. The point is that the government absolutely could just file your taxes for you and send you a check or a bill, if they weren't lobbied by tax prep companies like Intuit and extremists like Grover Norquist.

That's a popular view, but only true for people who don't have any deductions, depreciations, business expenses, mileage, etc. For a large group of people, the IRS can run the math only after you submit the full list of inputs.

This doesn’t preclude the government pre-filling and giving you the option to amend. It would save everyone time, even the people who amend because some information would already be pre-filled.

You could always apply to a refund based on that information. But the government already has 99% of what is needed to file your taxes, they are just not allowed by the lobby of tax preparation.

In sane countries, the "popular view" holds, as it should. Not so much in the US, though. The IRS knows how much I make, I want them to send me a form that says "we think you made this much, if that's true and you have no fancy deductions, sign here".

Then I just sign a form and return it instead of slogging through the bullshit that Intuit et al has lobbied for.

Ef the gouvernement! I know! not very constructive, but the topic is too depressive for any constructivability

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