I stopped paying taxes a decade ago. The results shocked me | Hacker News Reader

I stopped paying taxes a decade ago. The results shocked me

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22 pointsgeorgecmu20 comments

Depending on the jobs he had and if they took deductions, he probably doesn't owe that much - might have even gotten a refund some years? Even without deductions, the jobs listed "odd jobs" and bartending - a lot of his income was probably not reported.

The standard deduction is a lot for some people.

He specifically points out that he had filed as having nine dependents, so that they wouldn't take deductions and his paid taxes for the year would be zero. This is not "the standard employer withholding is close enough" but clear and premeditated fraud.

Even so, if he was making in the area of $30-$70k/yr during this time, the standard deduction would probably have him covered in the recent TCJA years, and in years before that, SALT may have him covered depending on where he lives.

There's a reason he hasn't heard much from the IRS about his situation: he's small potatoes. They've got plenty of bigger fish to fry, and they're not going to use all of their shiny new budget to go after poor people who owe them a few hundred bucks. They're going after high W2 earners who aren't quite rich enough to afford a world-class accountant.

Basically, this guy's experience is absolutely not generalizable. He thinks it is because he's not very smart.

I skipped paying mine for a year, when I was younger. I had done an early withdrawal on a 401K to finance a vacation to Europe, and I knew I owed, but I didn't have any money and I didn't want to deal with it, so I just didn't. Nobody ever bothered me about it. I squared up with the IRS the year after and they put me on a payment plan, no trouble.

This is how it should work. If you only have wages/salary as income, the government already knows how you much you earn, how much tax you paid, and how much you should pay, unless your employer paid you off the books.

IRS should just send you a letter stating those three things, and allow you to respond with yes, I agree, or no, this is not right.

Occasionally I'll hear some leader in a suit say that the US has a voluntary tax system, or that voluntary taxpayer compliance is a foundational principle of the US tax system, and that always sounds like a sick joke.

But here's this guy who just doesn't file, and nothing bad happens?

And now I see the IRS has a brand new program to start sending letters to tens of thousands of people with more than a million in income who never file at all [0].

They're just starting this now?

I feel like such a chump.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-launches-new-effort-aimed-a...

If you had a good job, you're not in the same boat.

Biden's newly millitarized IRS is going to be interesting TBH. I predict that we're going to see a lot of previously untaxed "almost poor" people start to pay taxes.

Apparently this proves right-wing conspiracy theories about a militarized IRS to be true ... the first thing tyrannical jackbooted thugs always do is "start sending letters" to people with millions in income who never file a return. The end is nigh.

Wasn’t a big chunk defunded within the year it was setup?

I keep getting hung up on while on hold with the IRS, I’d give them more money to actually answer the phone

Heard from someone you should call your local IRS office instead. Less time on hold. I haven't tried, myself.

Here’s the thing. If you are poor — making a low income — it doesn’t really mater. Even if you owe them some money you’re too insignificant for the IRS to worry about. More likely they owe you refund money and it will just sit there and even collect a wee bit of interest until you decide to square things.

I know a couple guys, both engineers, who stopped filing for 5 years simply because they didn't want to bother with the paperwork. Eventually they got some sort of warning letters and caught up. 10 years surprises me, especially with the 9 dependents.

What is the purpose of this article? Is it to highlight that the IRS needs funding? Or is it to encourage people to not pay their taxes?

It's weird to me that people don't see paying taxes as a social obligation to support the country that a lot of people claim to love. Me, I have some major hesitations about this country, but I still at least due the bare minimum to support it because it often means that my tax dollars can support others.

I'm pretty convinced that tax day exists just so that political actors have a target to demonize the day the gov't comes and "takes your money." When in fact, the people who benefit the most from our tax structure (the wealthy) don't actually pay their share. But I think it's playing right into their hands to demonize this day. If you really want to stick it to Elon and Bezos, I think you have to pay your taxes to the best of your ability, and make the IRS' job easier so they have more time to get the money they're owed from the wealthy holdouts.

But I know I'm in the minority on this one.

Republican's gutted the IRS. They have no personell for low level audits of indiviuals. They still rely on mainframes running COBOL programs from 60 years ago. It does them negative good to go after people who owe less than it costs to keep the lights on in the office.

I have a friend who works for the IRS. They basically can't spend more than a minute per client. Its basically "okay cool" move on. They gotta do like 40 cases a day.

The tricky part is that you're basically playing a lottery. If they audit you (and there's a very strong chance that in your lifetime it won't happen), you're likely to hit a bunch of fines. And if you know someone in the IRS they'll just tell you what you owe. And if they don't, basically nobody gives a shit.

That's what it is. Is the risk of a failed audit that much of an issue? Or not. And if you don't have the money / assets to pay the fines, they'll likely just give you a loan or maybe a reduced amount. The IRS rather get some money than no money.

Its... weird.

> I have a friend who works for the IRS. They basically can't spend more than a minute per client. Its basically "okay cool" move on. They gotta do like 40 cases a day.

A minute per case sounds stressful, but I suppose if they get a 40 minute workday it's a pretty good trade-off.

8 hours a day, that's 12 minutes a case. They also need to hang up as quickly as possible on their calls.

Yeah, if your case is remotely complex, they're fucked. The reality is that bad management is a direct cause of these issues.

In any case, the challenge is is the risk worth it. And at some income levels, yeah.

The article is good but it does sound like this guy had some witholdings (aka paid taxes) and has skirted consequences by lying to the IRS. Probably not a great idea but if you didn't make a lot of money its unlikely the IRS would've gone after you anyways.

The deductions he picked were for his employer, not the IRS. He didn't lie to the IRS, as if he filed, he would just owe more than someone who picked less dependents to withhold.

The not filing was the only issue the IRS would care about.

The tax code is an iron rod of oppression. I call on the readers of this site, who are collectively capable of implementing a system that is coherent, to rise up and insist that the operating system of the country suck less. Much, much less.

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