wait you guys have to pay to file taxes???
do they actually want you to evade taxes??
The tax system is so complicated, most people can’t handle navigating it on their own. Most people have jobs where taxes are automatically removed from pay checks and sent to both state and federal tax agencies. However, that amount is just an estimate and once a year (or quarter) you need to file paperwork to confirm whether you over or underpaid and then you either get a rebate (without interest), or you’ll need to send in a payment to make up the difference. That paperwork has been lobbied to remain as complicated as possible so that companies like Intuit can provide services that tax payers find useful and continue to pay for. This is more complicated for business owners, both big and small.
Well, in my opinion this will be a good platform for American progressives to run on: make taxes less complicated by getting rid of middle men.
This will absolutely 10000% never happen as long as lobbying exists in my opinion.
There is nothing wrong with lobbying…. There are lobbies for woman’s rights, black rights, all sorts of good causes have lobbies.
The politicians just bend over for corporate lobbies. Very important distinction. I think what would fit your argument better is will never happen as long as citizens United exists.
Any paid lobbying is bribery. Legislators should raise people’s opinion who voted them in and act as representative, not say what others pay them to say.
I can’t believe it is legal in so many countries. Apparently though it seems more problematic in the US but European countries aren’t immune either.
I mean someone has to pay the lobbiests. The National Organization for women pays lawyers to write laws for them to present to congress, through lobbiests who are also paid. You want feminist groups who are allowed to write feminist laws and present them to congress right? You want someone to advocate for laws you want right? That’s lobbying?
Citizens united is what you guys are thinking of. The one where corporations can donate infinite money to politicians? So when a corporate lobby brings anti-feminist legislation, they then contribute lots of money to the politician they are lobbying. And magically the politican ignores their voters and sides with the anti-feminist pro corporate law. That’s citizens united. It’s not a problem with lobbying. You have a problem with corporate lobbys not womans rights lobbys right? You have a problem with your representatives favoring corporate lobbys because they get infinite money throught… DRUM ROLL… Citizens united.
I really hope this helps.
When we were legalizing cannabis in Maine the local growers had to form a lobby to fight against the out of state corporate growers who also had a powerful lobby. Banning lobbying doesn’t help it just takes away peoples voices. Lobbying is just a group of people pooling resources to enact common legislation or political goals. It’s an important part of the political process people neglect. and it’s been diluted by money. Don’t need to dilute it further with misinformation.
and it’s been diluted by money
That’s why they said “any paid lobbying is bribery”. While anyone can sign a petition to your representative and that’s technically also lobbying, what we’re talking about here is not that. In a democracy, every person gets their voice heard. With lobbying, only the dollar speaks.
There needs to be more citizen lobbying. What really needs to happen is citizens organizing, pooling their money, and hiring lobbyists, just like big corporations do.
A look at the Forbes Fortune500 should point out why that’s basically impossible.
Just looking at the top one, Walmart, not even considering anyone else on this list, their raw profit in 2024 after all expenses and payrolls and everything was
$15,511,000,000.00
Amazon in the #2 spot made almost double that. Remember this isn’t revenue, this is profit, this is extra money after all normal expenses are paid.
If I pulled together every single person I’ve ever met in my life, regardless of their opinion of me, and we all donated all the money we had ever made in our lives, we might approach a tenth of Walmart’s 2024 profits.
The wealth inequality gap in America is large enough that it is actually difficult to wrap your head around. The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars - to be exact, you’ll need 999 million more dollars to reach it after you have your first million in the bank. Fighting corporate money with citizens’ money is not only wasteful but impossible.
Now much of that money do they spend on lobbyists?
You and I will never know, but it could be up to that amount without even impacting daily activities.
Working within a corrupt system often serves to more deeply entrench that system.
No. You can file your taxes for free. And, if you ever pay to file your taxes, you’re not paying the government, you’re paying for tax preparation software or for a tax professional to do your taxes for you.
But! Even if your tax situation is very simple, filing your taxes on your own is difficult. In Europe, the government sends you a form with what they think you owe based on all the information they have on you. If you agree with the calculation, you just send the form back and either pay or receive a refund.
In the US your employer gives you some sheets of paper with some values on it. Your bank gives you some different forms. And so-on. When it’s tax time, you gather up all that paper, hope you have it all, try to remember what forms you need and if you have them, and then painstakingly try to copy the right values from the W-2, 1099-INT, and so on into the right boxes on form 1040, 1040 Schedule 1, 1040 Schedule 2, 1040 Schedule H, 1095-A, and so on. Then, you try to do the calculations where it says to multiply the value from 1040 row 43 by the correct value in table A9. A9 has different values depending on how many dependants you have, and if you’re filing jointly or alone.
Basically, it’s doable on your own, especially if you have a fairly standard / simple tax situation. But, it’s easy to make a mistake along the way. If you ever need an explanation about what you’re supposed to do, that information exists, but it’s in accountanteze, and it often refers to about 5 other IRS publications that just complicate things further. And, when you’re dealing with thousands of dollars, a mistake could be really costly. So, most people buy a copy of TurboTax every year for $30, which somehow turns into $60 by the time you’re actually ready to file because the $30 version only covers people in situation X, and since you have Y you need to upgrade.
TurboTax then takes $1 out of the $60 you paid them, and goes to Washington with that to lobby politicians to keep the tax code complicated so that people need to buy a new TurboTax every year. (Oh yeah, and things change just enough that every year you need to buy the latest software to file your taxes.)
Australia prefills all the information from employers, banks, share market registers so most people can log onto the government website, go to their tax account and accept the prefilled form
Yeah, most places do. AFAIK it’s just Canada and the US that don’t.
Here in the UK I have never had to file taxes. It’s all done as PAYE. Whatever software your employer uses will work out how much you owe via your tax code each pay packet and it’s auto deducted. It’s only self employed people (maybe other types of earner, I wouldn’t know, I’m just a waged employee) who have to submit their tax forms. It’s weird other countries aren’t doing it this way.
In Europe, the government sends you a form with what they think you owe based on all the information they have on you. If you agree with the calculation, you just send the form back and either pay or receive a refund.
That’s not true everywhere in Europe
No? Where don’t they do that? Is what they have similar to the terrible US system?
I mean, yes, because if they catch you evading taxes then they get a free slave for the term of your incarceration. To them it’s a win-win.
oh shit yeah, theres that too.
beacon of democracy.
Oh good I’m not the only one who doesn’t understand.
Imagine having to pay to give the government money. I had to open this to confirm what I was reading.
No they just want us to do our part by both paying taxes to the government and paying corporations that pay the government. All makes sense in a tidy corporofascisit system.
Removed by mod
Because companies lobby Congress to prohibit major IRS restructuring and spending. If the IRS had auto filing and a bigger budget, it would make more money than ever before.
The IRS could go after and audit rich people while the common person just gets a check in the mall from their returns. Maybe even no check, as the returns are only from miscalculations by the federal system, which is due to a bad system in place.
We need a federal tax system in the US. No one likes paying taxes but we do. The IRS is the center of that for the Feds. And the Republicans gut it because it’s easy to say “I’ll lower your taxes” but not solve where the money comes from.
returns are only from miscalculations by the federal system,
Well, not really. More like incomplete calculations, erring on the side of overpayment because people are generally extra upset if they have to pay in at the end of the year, even if they technically made more money as a result. People are used to and kind of ignore the tax portion of the paycheck they never get, but they feel the taxation of actually making an active payment. So people get happy about the zero interest loan they give to the government because in the moment it feels like “free money”
My employer has to do withholding without knowledge of other potential household income, credits, or deductions, though that last is pretty much given for everyone given how high the standard deduction is now.
thats always my first thought when this subject comes up.
Yeah I figured the Canadian system we have was as bad as the US’s but apparently not. Having to pay to file is wild
Pay to file and get charged if we don’t pay the amount that the IRS knows that we owe.
They literally know how much we owe but make us pay a private company to calculate that number and then charge us if that private company didn’t help us get the right number.
So the private company offers more “protection” and “tax experts” they charge us more for and make their “calculator” a little less helpful every year so you feel like you need the “tax expert” AI chat to help you avoid a charge.
Capitalism is the most efficient system. CAPITALISM IS THE MOST EFFICIENT SYSTEM.
It’s technically free to file federal and the tax prep companies must offer this by law. But there are tons of loopholes to this to the point that many people pay to file even when they don’t have to.
State taxes are always charged if they need to be filed. It’s free in some states but not a lot and there is no requirement on most states for how much the tax prep software charges for that.
No, and no. It is typically more convenient to pay to file taxes though. These companies hand hold you through the process and often have some protection for you if you get audited.
That said, this still means the government needs to make things easier for everyone. You shouldn’t feel like you need help to just file a standard tax return if all you do is have a regular job, no investments, and no deductions. Which is something like half of the US.
A million dollars is all it takes to buy whatever laws you want? That’s a really good deal for Intuit.
Remember all those (exactly) 1 million dollar “donations” all those CEOs were giving to Trump’s inaugural campaign? Those weren’t donations, they were bribes and kissing of the ring. Pledge loyalty (and pay a small fee) and the government will work for you.
Except if you’re Google or Facebook. Trump will accept your money and still fuck you over. Why anyone trusts him is beyond me.
They don’t trust him, but they don’t want to get on his bad side. They’re basically hoping that he’ll ignore them or forget about them, and focus his attention on his other enemies.
Worked out for Apple. Timmy Cook was able to get an exemption on the tariffs for cell phones.
Politicians get their jobs through an eagerness to bootlick capital.
Removed by mod
your political system is already based on legalized bribery and this is where you draw the line? lmao. Lobbying has destroyed america for a century.
Legalized bribery is only bad when the other team is in office. When your team is bribed, it’s handy so they can run again in 4 years. Just don’t ask them to do any campaign promises that go against their donors.
What other team? A non shit country has like 10 parties that come and go regularly as time moves on.
It was founded on lies and lobbying. Remember “taxation without representation”? Americans were on a 90% tax discount compared to the British. America was founded off the back of the particularly idiotic, greedy and gullible, and they’ve continued on that path to present. And some fool gave them weapons.
Fuck Intuit!
It’s a little late now, but don’t forget that FreeTaxUSA is free for federal and cheap for state. Also much less annoying to use than Intuit TurboTax. They don’t do those fake loading animations like “checking the best deal!” As if a computer can’t do like a billion of those a second.
If I had to guess, this is a holdover from the 90s where people didn’t trust a quick calculation, and probably doubted the application was properly choosing the standard or itemized deductions.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
Genuinely amazing. They are easier to use than turbo tax in my experience.
Intuit has been doing this for a long time, just in case anyone was wondering why $1 million seems like a low bribe. And it goes beyond preventing you from filing your taxes for free, with one of their goals being to make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible, so you are too frustrated to do it yourself.
This if from a 2019 Pro Publica article:
But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.
For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.”
Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states.
Imagine paying to file taxes, lmao
That’s called bribery in my country. It’s disgusting and very prevalent here but at least we don’t embellish the idea with polite terminology 😂
There’s… there’s a tax on taxes??
They might call it something like a convenience fee.
Removed by mod
I mean I feel like it depends on their role in the company. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing the work they do. I know at least a few people who work in billing for a healthcare company that don’t want to do that work and understand it’s bad but don’t really have another choice as they couldn’t get any other jobs. I’m not gonna blame someone for working at a bad company unless they’re like an executive or other high up person who could take their skills to a different industry.
Anyone who advocates for ostracizing fellow workers indiscriminately is doing it in order to keep the working class bogged down in endless internal feuds instead of organizing. Solidarity is the only solution.
Solidarity should also involve being united on what work is acceptable and what is not.
This doesn’t seem indiscriminate to me. I think we 100% should judge people who work for evil corporations, regardless of what their position is.
Wait, so I wasn’t supposed to punch that guy in the janitors uniform in the dick just because he said Intuit (turns out he was saying “into it”)?
Then they should do their job exactly as half-assedly as it’s possible to do without actually being fired. Steal coffee and creamer from the kitchen. Steal toilet paper. Accidentally deleted System32 on the office computer. Open all file attachments and links in emails. Crop-dust the bosses office. Start office rumours to sow discord and erode company loyalty. Slip and fall on a stair, go on extended paid medical leave. When fired, sue for wrongful termination, crowdfund the legal fees
That’s a fair strategy if you actually can organize with other people at your work to do things like that. But it still does rely on having enough stability to get fired and not end up homeless while getting a new job or trying to sue. Crowdfunding can work if you happen to get lucky and your story gets picked up by lots of people, but it can also reach no one and leave you with nothing. So at the end of the day it’s gonna come down to organizing, if only there was some kind of organized body of workers you could form to fight policies that are bad for people in general along with being bad for the workers.
Removed by mod
Million dollar is practically nothing for this kind of company, they will net billions from this.
Even their corruption is incompetent.
Historically senators and representatives side with companies who’ve only given them thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in contributions. It’s very cheap to buy a vote.
Though often there’s also the understanding that a career spent supporting them will be rewarded with a cushy, high-paying lobbying job once they leave politics. Or paid speaking gigs if you’re the President.
It’s not incompetent to give someone a penny and have them give you back $100. That’s a great investment. So I would have to say their corruption is very confident if they can give a million dollar bribe and get back a billion dollars of revenue.
I meant that the administration (i.e. Trump) is incompetent for selling the country for pennies.
Art of the deal baby
I think they mean the government corruption. How cheap it is to buy votes. You can buy a Supreme Court justice with an RV.
deleted by creator
And if you’re in France, don’t use TurboTax, use the official government website that calculates everything for you reliably every year :o
deleted by creator
With the nice simulator mode so you can run the numbers and see how much you need to budget for well beforehand.
Unfortunately, the tool WealthSimple provides used to be called SimpleTax. It was made by a team in Vancouver and operated as donationware. You could file your taxes then choose however much you wanted to donate to them for the tool. They promised that they’d never sell your data, and never charge for the tool.
But… then they sold out to WealthSimple, who of course removed that promise to never sell your data.
I’ll stick to FreeTaxUsa even if they charge me. Fuck Intuit.
Wait sorry what? Non-USian here, bear with me.
What does “program” mean here? Why is this program necessary to file your taxes for free? Do you guys have PAY to file your taxes if you don’t use/apply/qualify for that program?? Am I misunderstanding what it means to “file” taxes? It’s been a while since I was this confused by a US thing.
US tax code is (deliberately) complicated and unlike other countries, you need to manually fill out the forms with your financial data even though the government already knows it and what you owe (minus exemptions that the vast majority of citizens won’t claim). This is because there is a major industry around tax preparation, and the big names (such as Intuit) have aggressively lobbied for decades to keep the process as complicated and inconvenient as possible so that people are forced to pay them to fill out their tax forms. This lobbying has also resulted in the legally mandated free filing options being buried and hard to find, with many people not even knowing they exist.
Tax prep is a huge scam with many billions of dollars behind it. Weather providers are probably going to be next in the news, since they’ve been trying to kill the free government-run forecasts and force people onto their paid platforms for just as long.
Free Tax USA is easy to use and free for federal, $15 for state. I used it last time. This time I filed for an extension because the IRS might be so gutted by October I won’t even have to pay. And I owe a lot because I was a contractor for most of 2024.
Normally I have no problem paying taxes but this time it’s different.
Okay so the “paying” is for when you use third parties to “help” you file, yes? You don’t pay the government for the privilege of being able to file, yes? So what does/did this Free File thing do?
Taxes aren’t easy in Germany either, I’m glad I have a husband who is level-headed enough to do them for us both because I’d always have a near mental breakdown when I tried. But it’s always been obvious to me where and how to file without involving anyone I’d have to pay. Fuck.
Personal filing is always free, the “free” in “free filing” refers to the prep part. It just means you fill out and submit your taxes yourself rather than paying a tax firm’s accountants to do it for you. Calling it that makes it seem like the firms are part of the process rather than bloated parasites feeding off taxpayers. I wouldn’t be surprised if the name was also a result of their influence.
Their accountants can claim exemptions and rebates buried in the tax code that laymen wouldn’t know exist - ones that they lobbied for to make their services more attractive. It makes them worthwhile for some households, but only because they’re solving a problem they birthed and grew in the first place.
IRS Direct File was just a free government-run alternative to the tax filing programs like TurboTax.
You can still do your taxes by hand without the help of any software for free, but they’ve killed the website that fills out the forms automatically and the manual process is significantly more complicated.
Free file is software that people use to file. As far as I’m aware, it’s always been free to print out the forms and mail it all in.
The existing paid weather and mapping services are not excited. Right now they just repackage days that’s provided by the government for free, so while their customer base isn’t as big as it would be without NOAA, NWS, and USGS data available to anyone, their expenses are super low.
They’d need 1000x at many customers to cover the expense of gathering their own data.
Instead, what they’ll all end up doing is paying huge money to third party services (e.g.SpaceX), who have existing infrastructure that can be used to launch weather monitoring services and will end up being the only ones to benefit from this.
Their argument is that the government releasing detailed weather data for free makes it impossible for commercial offerings to compete. So it’s likely they’ll either lobby to force the government services to stop providing anything other than the raw data (leaving weather companies to translate it into forecasts and useful visualizations), or to privatize the NOAA weather stations and satellites so they can sell the data for profit.
Removed by mod
Turns out that when you do make that vote, the fucking Cheeto looking stupid fucker who takes bribes still wins. And I voted as hard as I could!
Removed by mod
Definition: A system of services, opportunities, or projects, usually designed to meet a social need.
In this case, a digital service provided directly by the IRS, hence the name “Direct File.” In contrast, filing by paper is still supported. Tax preparation businesses have been actively preventing the US filing process from being simplified, naturally because that’s the reason they make money.
So this Direct File thing is simply for filing your taxes online? Because we have a thing like that too (doesn’t every “civilised” country?). And that’s what they want to abolish? US lobbyists are something else, man.
They want to be the middleman, so requirements for them to provide a free filing service are hidden and direct competition is in this case buried.
