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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of comments along the lines of "xxx is cheap"

Why on earth do you need a third party for your tax calc and resolution? It is surely the antithesis of the "land of the free" and all that stuff.

In the boring old UK I login to a govt. run website to do my annual tax self assessment. My P60 is already filled in (that's my PAYE - pay as you earn, my normal salary) I'm a company director too so I have dividends and expenses and offsets etc to worry about. It takes around an hour to complete.

Most UK employees don't do self assessment. PAYE is such a simple and obvious idea - routine taxation should be done by routine.

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> Most UK employees don't do self assessment. PAYE is such a simple and obvious idea - routine taxation should be done by routine.

Just to double down on this, what gerdesj is describing only affects a very small portion of workers. For those who _don't_ do the steps above the process is:

- It's automatically taken out of your pay, and you don't do anything.

That's it.

An argument can be made that since Americans are inherently distrustful of any forms of government whatsoever, it emboldens them if they feel like they're the one who has agency when submitting these forms to the IRS.

> Why on earth do you need a third party for your tax calc and resolution? It is surely the antithesis of the "land of the free" and all that stuff.

Because the IRS isn't allowed to tell you what you owe. You're supposed to calculate that yourself... (And it's so damn complicated that it's worth paying someone to do it, unless you were the kid who did the math textbook for fun.)

Eventually, the IRS calculates what they think you owe, and if you underpaid, they send you a bill. You can respond explaining why they are wrong, or pay. The interest is so low that, as long as you don't goof up every year, you're better off risking underpayment than overpayment.

Honestly, the system would work better if the tax prep software could see all the information the IRS has, because then it would be easier to correct their mistakes and harder to make mistakes.

What's to say it doesn't start incorporating some of that data in the future? Having an official IRS tax prep tool is absolutely the first step towards that.

>Because the IRS isn't allowed to tell you what you owe.

>Eventually, the IRS calculates what they think you owe, and if you underpaid, they send you a bill

It definitely feels like a few steps could be skipped here…

> (And it's so damn complicated that it's worth paying someone to do it, unless you were the kid who did the math textbook for fun.)

The vast majority of taxes that are filed by US taxpayers are simple. Unless you're extrapolating your own experience to everyone else, that is.

    The vast majority of taxes that are filed by US taxpayers are simple.

I assume you meant "tax returns" (instead of taxes). Have you ever paid income tax in another country (other than the US)? Many highly advanced countries do not require a tax return as long you are a regular salaried employee who makes less than X (usually a pretty large number). Even interest paid from a bank account or capital gains from securities trading would be handled automatically. It is crazy how much work you need to do in the US ... even for a "simple" filing.

I have, and I don't disagree that other countries are vastly simpler than the average, or even most simple, US tax return.

I just think it's disingenuous to paint all US tax returns as this difficult, complex beast.

Seems ingenuous to me. Except when Tele-File was a thing, every time has been 1-4 hours of torture, hoping all the places that are required to send me forms have done so (on time & correct), hoping that I have filled everything correctly, hoping that some unknown change of requirements hasn't made my past experience with some section irrelevant or misleading, and sometimes wondering why for the exact same inputs as the previous year (as occasionally happens) I am now told that instead of getting $X back I now owe $n*X.

I sometimes end up plugging the currently requested info into 2 to 4 tax prep sites (discarding the highest results, unless the lowest seemed to come from a glitchy or confusingly-worded site), because even they can give wildly different results.

> Have you ever paid income tax in another country (other than the US)?

No, but I do know that it's much simpler. We (the US) seem to have a "not invented here" syndrome towards learning from how other countries improve over our system.

> It is crazy how much work you need to do in the US ... even for a "simple" filing.

The old rumor is that drug dealers and gangsters get convicted for tax evasion.

    We (the US) seem to have a "not invented here" syndrome towards learning from how other countries improve over our system.

I see this pattern repeat when I speak to people from (physically) large countries: Brazil, Australia, Russia, China, etc. It seems like the larger your country, the most culturally isolated that you become. Small to medium sized countries are more willing to look outside their borders for good ideas.

> Because the IRS isn't allowed to tell you what you owe

Is there a legitimate reason for this or is this just a joke?

There's a perfectly legitimate reason - citizen's united allows corporations to bribe government officials into writing laws that benefit them.

If taxes worked simply and logically, the whole population wouldn't have to pay $100+ each year to Intuit and H&R Block, which would not please the shareholders.

https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

You're expecting coherency in the American libertarian mindset. There is none. "why should the government control the means of tax filing! I need to be free to pay a private company to do it!"

Libertarians who want to pay taxes.. Now there's a powerful lobby. Have you considered starting a think tank with your political acumen lol

It’s not just that. Remember this is normal in the US.

Paper sucks. Tax filing helpers (people/software) have always cost money. “The government sucks” and won’t try to help you.

And, oh yeah, ads and tax prep stores everywhere.

No one questions it. They don’t like it, but they accept it. Just like so many other things in the US because we’ve never seen anything else.

I’ve paid taxes in countries where it pre-filled forms.

Guess what I do? I get all my forms together. Look up the numbers on the forms. Double check the entries on the fillable forms are correct.

Then I get my paystubs, I check the deductions, double check the prefilled form is correct.

So what did it save me over the way US taxes are done? The form prefilled the numbers, that’s it. All the rest is the same. Same collecting forms, same doubling checking math.

And why? Because mistakes are made. My employer sent the wrong numbers in, so the prefilled form was incorrect and would have cost me about $1,000 in extra tax.

If you want to make tax filing better, make the tax code way more simple. I’ve lived in countries where the tax form was 2 pages with 12 entires. That’s it.

Now that is the way to go. I could care less about fillable forms.

> So what did it save me over the way US taxes are done? The form prefilled the numbers, that’s it. All the rest is the same. Same collecting forms, same doubling checking math.

I'd wager that ~90% of people where I'm from where we have pre-filled tax forms does their taxes in less than 5 min (ah, looks reasonable, click).

That's a good reason why low income people stay low income.

It's your money. You'd be smart to spend more than 5 minutes to make sure it's 100% right

Not everyone is a arrogant cheapskate like yourself. The actual reason is that it's 99% of the time correct due to it generally being a well-functioning system proven over time.

Easy thing to say when you’re rich.

In my case it was $900 difference.

I guess I’m not making those fat tech dollars like you where $900 extra is “close enough”.

Must be nice. But try and remember not every is rich like you. $900 is the difference between paying rent and being homeless for a lot of people.

90% of people in my country means that obviously not all are rich.

Then try and have some sympathy for people less off than you.

Pathetically dishonest pivot.

*Conspiracy hat on*

Paying income ta is made into an arduous task so people are likely to vote against taxes or for repeal of taxes instead of being accepted as a fact of life.

No need for the hat. As I understand, that is an explicit goal of influential political operatives like Grover Norquist and the Americans for Tax Reform (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform)

> Why on earth do you need a third party for your tax calc and resolution? It is surely the antithesis of the "land of the free" and all that stuff.

You don't; you can download the forms and fill them out yourself. It's annoying but doable.

That said, it really should be better; your description sounds like a good outcome.

Exactly. Here in the UK I get paid a salary and so my tax is just automatically calculated and deducted from my pay. Then yearly my taxable benefits are calculated by payroll and deducted from next years taxes

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