pan to tax preparation companies taking turns sucking off Uncle Sam
My son made a mistake on his state taxes and his return was rejected. The letter he got back basically said “we couldn’t verify your reported property taxes, so you can resubmit a correction or do nothing and accept our version of your taxes” (where he gets back about $200 less because of a typo.)
So, like, yeah. They’re just comparing your notes to theirs, with the default benefiting the state.
Seems like the property taxes would be the easiest thing in the world for them to verify. Unless they’ve been lying to themselves.
There’s a lot. Every tax form you get is submitted to the government as well. W2,1095 a, 1099, property taxes etc. For most people, the government could just send a letter saying: we have all the documents. Do you want to itemize or take a standard deduction? Do you have anything else to report? Cool. The people that would still have complicated taxes would be the self employed.
Yes, it would be helpful if people didn’t have to chase down a bunch of forms that were submitted to the IRS already. But for instance in our family there’s a lot of medical expenses, well over the minimum for us to deduct them, so we’d still want to do that.
Yeah itemized deductions would still need to be offered, but for many people the work would be minimal since it usually makes sense to select the standard deduction. That’s horrible that you even have to pay that much for medical expenses but that’s a whole other conversation lol.
I believe they had a typo entering their PIN. The property number is like 15 digits long with multiple hyphens. It was fine last year, but this year they got “wE cAn’T vErIfY yOuR pRoPeRtY tAxeS” .🙄
No panning required, just zoom out on the last frame and its quite explicit, with Unc’s thought bubble being “I’M HAVING ONE!”
“Listen bub, I’m just telling you what Intuit and H&R block pays me to tell you. So yeah, I both know and don’t know what you owe. Let’s call it Schrodinger’s taxes and call it a day.”
You don’t know what we know about what you owe.
God, I would hate to have to work out my taxes every year laughs in British
Its a nice break from figuring out if the amount my medical providers charged me lines up with the estimation of benefits provided by my medical insurance company and trying to get a denied claim paid.
I know what you mean. Laughs in Dutch
I hate fucking taxes. Just stayed on a call with Fidelity because I overpaid my 401k by a few dollars and they don’t know how to set a reimbursement. Now I’m on a call with Anthem because they don’t know why I never got my 1099-SA. Fuck. I really fucking hate taxes.
Of course they have to mail it to me. Now I gotta figure out how to calculate my own 1099 SA.
What is special about today?
I enter in my w4 and take the standard deduction. Takes me 5 minutes.
Haven’t owed since I had a retail job that reset my withholding when I got promoted to make it look like I got a bigger raise.
Do you not earn interest on any accounts? No loans on which you pay interest? Are you a student?
Like I said: standard deduction. Those numbers never come close to make itemized deductions worth the time and effort.
Interest is income, so your W-2 won’t be enough to account for that. You’ll also need to go to any banks, taxable brokerage accounts, etc, because that money will impact your taxable income. Still not a ton of work, but it’s still more than just W-2 + standard deduction.
Thanks for the casual assumption brokerage accounts enter into the picture.
No savings for interest, all income goes to debts and expenses.
But I am doing relatively great almost entirely because my housing costs are comparatively low and locked in for 27 more years.
That’s fair. My point though is that with higher IRS funding, poorer people are probably going to get audited more, and if you’re only using your W-2, you’re probably missing something and could get caught with an audit.
Other things that could factor in:
- bank account bonuses - i.e. that $100 to sign up for an account or whatever (usually doesn’t include credit card rewards, but that can also depend)
- gambling wins
- interest on inheritance money, if any
Most people aren’t going to have anywhere near enough taxable investment income for that to matter.
I think I got about $.87 in interest payments from bank accounts in the past year. I don’t think that’s going to make a huge difference in taxable income.
You need a better bank account then.
Let’s say you have $10k in cash (typical emergency fund) and get 4% on it (relatively competitiv; e.g. Ally gives 4.25%), that’s $400 in interest (not including compounding), which is a reportable amount of income. If you’re doing something clever or have a bit more cash for some reason (e.g. saving for a house), you could easily get into more interesting amounts of money.
$10k in cash (typical emergency fund)
There’s your mistake right there, thinking people have even $10k to serve as a spare emergency fund.
I don’t even have a thousand spare right now for an emergency.
I had like $6k savings until I did my taxes and apparently everything I saved up was how much I owed the tax man. I thought I had actually gotten ahead but turns out that was an illusion lol
It’s just an example. You can get semi-interesting numbers with just regular cash flow, depending on what kind of interest your accounts get. Let’s say you make $60k/year and your money sits in your account on average for 5 days. So that’s essentially the same as $800-900 (
($60k / 26) * (5/14)) earning whatever your interest rate is on your account. That’s something like $20-40 for 2-5%. That money counts.Your risk of an audit increases the more discrepancy the automated checks find. This article claims poorer people are getting targeted more and more, so I think it makes sense to take a few extra minutes to report all of the little accounts you may have.
Yea I appreciate the dude trying to make sure people don’t forget stuff and get fucked by the irs but he’s a bit privileged thinking we’re all as well off as he is.
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I mean, that’s essentially what our taxes are. Things vary based on tax brackets, state, dependents/spouses, and total earnings of course, but we all have a base tax.
The hard part of taxes is usually deductions, or when you start having things like investments or small businesses.
I guess that was some sort of short-circuit on my part?
No, you’re right that it’s extremely complicated. But the complexity doesn’t come from the base rates. You’re likely thinking of the process as a whole instead of the starting point.
