Can’t you file your taxes for free in the US if you know how?
You can also just not file your taxes, if you don't owe anything (and as I said, jobs always err on the side of overpaying) they won't bother you, but most people end up eligible for the tax refund, so it is more beneficial to pay for that service.
One thing I can say for sure: doing taxes with a computer takes me longer than filling out the paper forms by hand! There are so many delays while "calculated" (as if a ghz computer can't add numbers fast), and loading question pages that I can obviously skip (I never worked for the rail road, I'm not blind...) but take extra time because of how they setup the UI.
From the IRS website:
>Who must file >Most U.S. citizens or permanent residents who work in the U.S. have to file a tax return. >Generally, you need to file if: > Your income is over the filing requirement > You have over $400 in net earnings from self-employment (side jobs or other independent work) > You had other situations that require you to file
Not sure if your intent was to discourage filing, but it read that way to me.
OTOH it would be a pretty dumb move since the chances that the amount taken out of your checks was exactly right is very small, and you’d be leaving hundreds or thousands of dollars in refunds unclaimed.
The spreadsheet downloadable at https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home (no affiliation) is helpful to avoid math errors and get the entries from the various schedules into the proper place on the main forms.
Even this is overselling it.
Most people have ZERO deductions to deal with. You put in your W2 pay, you take the standard deduction, and you file and get your money back.
Next time you use something like turbotax, download the forms it generates and look at them. There's zero complexity. Turbotax doesn't do anything. It's literally filling in 14 rows of numbers that come directly from your W2.
Hell, turbotax purposely runs fake animations and makes you waste a ton of time saying "Oh we are looking for all these deductions" but it's all a lie. None of the animations actually do anything. Most of the deductions it is supposedly checking for would Never apply to someone with a normal job. They want you to think it's complicated. They will ask you questions they know the answer to just to waste your time. Every single year, TurboTax asks me if I'm eligible for the earned income tax credit, and every single year, TurboTax knows from the previous questions that I cannot possibly be eligible. They ask me anyway, because it seems like a complicated credit so it makes taxes seem more complicated.
Taxes could take less than 15 minutes for nearly all Americans. Turbotax's bullshit, even disregarding the stupid tax they are charging the whole country just to copy some numbers from column a to column b literally wastes everyone's time every year.
People who insist that taxes are complicated are flat out wrong. If you run a small business, you absolutely have the choice to just file extremely simple taxes and pay a higher tax rate. It is a choice to attempt to take every possible deduction. Each and every one of those deductions is a handout to business owners. They bitch and moan about how bad taxes are, but their taxes are complicated so that they can make more profit.
Guess what? Nobody forces you to run a business, which again, is a handout to capital owners. A few hundred dollars in permits or registration every year is a perfectly valid cost to enable you to take advantage of the insane benefit of "you can literally cause hundreds of deaths but as long as you weren't obviously grossly negligent you are in the clear". Nobody forced you to attempt to take every single handout offered every single year. Nobody forced you to be your own boss, to own capital, to profit off of the labor of others.
Such entitlement. These same people will turn around and cry about "freeloaders" and "welfare queens" and "handouts"
And obviously the draft usually assumes that you will have to pay more tax, since there’s a perverse incentive given it’s the government who fills it for you.
I wonder if the explanation actually had to do with these people who used to do the job 15 years ago influencing the process to ensure they remain relevant. Kind of like in the US actually.