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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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>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…

> 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...

> (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.

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.

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