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On your own. (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by ekZepp@lemmy.world to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
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[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 9 points 7 months ago

If the USA didn’t have such a complicated tax system

For 95% of the public, its not complicated. Its just getting all the independent pieces of information from different private agencies.

  • W2 from employer
  • 1098 from your mortgage company
  • 1099 from your retirement account firm
  • Prove you have health insurance
  • Prove you have student debts
  • Prove you have a small business and you've tracked your receipts
  • Prove you have children
  • Prove you paid taxes to your state

Once you have all the numbers lined up, its simple arithmetic. Easy for a computer to do.

But knowing who to ask for all the individual chunks of data is an obnoxious chore that only one organization does particularly well. And that organization - the IRS - won't tell you the information they have. They want you to guess and tell them what you have, so they can tell you if you got it right or not.

[-] dan@upvote.au 10 points 7 months ago

And that organization - the IRS - won’t tell you the information they have. They want you to guess and tell them what you have, so they can tell you if you got it right or not.

This really needs to be fixed.

In Australia, the stuff the government knows about you gets prefilled in the tax return form. Not as good as other countries where the entire thing is completed for you, but better than the USA. The form is significantly shorter than the US one.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

but better than the USA

When the bar is "You get nothing. Zero. Goose-egg." its fairly easy to clear.

The form is significantly shorter than the US one.

A big part of the US tax game is giving you a relatively high base rate and then sending you hunting for deductions and credits. One of the upshots of the Trump Tax Cut has been to raise the standard deduction so high that most of those deductions and credits are worthless. So the form is deceptively long. It's almost impossible to use your Schedule A for anything anymore.

[-] aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 6 months ago

In the USA, you can download your tax transcript at will from the IRS, and it includes all information they have. Commenter you’re replying to is underinformed.

[-] DrRatso@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 months ago

Just reading that gave me a headache. In Latvia, heres how the system works.

If you have no deductible spending (medical, education, donations).:

  • Log into the govt system.
  • Press a button to generate tax form.
  • Press verify and submit.
  • Pay what you owe or wait for the tax return.

If you have deductible info

  • As before but also scan your receipts, and add the info on each receipt to the form. Can done easily via an app, which handily (sometimes correctly) can autofill the needed info. You can do this at any point in time, so you can do it whenever you get a deductible receipt.
[-] Kornblumenratte@feddit.de 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)
  • As before but also scan your receipts, and add the info on each receipt to the form. Can done easily via an app, which handily (sometimes correctly) can autofill the needed info. You can do this at any point in time, so you can do it whenever you get a deductible receipt.

I'm so envious!

[-] aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 6 months ago

they will definitely tell you, just go online and download your tax transcript – it contains all reported information.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Its not quite that simple, because you need to know what a "tax transcript" is and also set yourself up with a new kind of ID that I'd never heard of before today.

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/get-transcript

Not exactly front-facing on the website, which is itself not exactly easy to navigate.

this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
970 points (98.1% liked)

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