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Rules
0. Keep it legal
Bout fuckin time. The tax filing system is such a racket. Paying private companies to do meaningless paperwork for us, with severe consequences if we refuse. Making shit so complicated that you need a professional to figure it out. Etc.
Did you know in other countries you don't have to file taxes, that shit just gets taken care of when you get your wages. But I bet there's still some control freaks and bootlickers who wanna say it's better to do it yourself....
I live in Norway, and every institution like banks, employers etc reports to the tax authority. My tax papers are prefilled and the only thing I have to do is check that everything is correct. Most times it is, it's just major stuff like buying a house, getting married, moving etc which might entitle you to deductions that's not automatically added. If I don't do anything, the prefilled default is filed on a certain date, so I never even have to sign in and open the tax forms if I don't want to.
If you run your own business as a sole proprietorship taxes gets more complicated, but most people don't do that.
Oh our system in the US works the exact same way... Except you also have to send the IRS your own version that they will then compare to what your employer and financial institutions sent them. Better send it in too, because they need both versions to compare of course. And if you mess it up they'll check every nook and cranny of your financials and under all your mattresses and couch cushions for that discrepancy.
But how will the companies who make money off the fact that people are forced to line up to get fleeced by them get victims now? Socialism! Communism! Terrorism! I thought this was America!
lol right. Same reasoning we need more traffic cops so we can write tickets to get money to pay for the traffic cops. Justice!
I resent your slandering of traffic cops as self-serving institution! If each village police force weren't funded with enough military hardware to win a war against a medium-sized country, who would provide the private industrial prison complex with such insane amounts of free slave labour? Do you think all those members of minorities would turn themselves in to provide free work for the owners of those prisons? They sure as hell wouldn't put themselves into the spiral of ever-deepening debt originating from arbitrary legal charges leading to prison stays where they can finally put all that freedom to good use as right-less worker drones.
Definitely a move in the right direction! This version will apparently be limited to 13 states and only for people with relatively simple returns, but again this is better than before so I’ll take it for now. Here’s to one day having this available to everyone.
Title is a little misleading and since we don’t read articles:
It’s in pilot and only 13 states are participating in 2024:
Arizona, California, Massachusetts and New York have decided to work with the IRS to integrate their state taxes into the Direct File pilot for filing season 2024. Taxpayers in nine other states without an income tax – Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming -- may also be eligible to participate in the pilot. Washington has also chosen to join the integration effort for the state's application of the Working Families Tax Credit. All states were invited to join the pilot, but not all states were in a position to join the pilot at this time.
Pretty big limitations too: only individual filers, not joint. And only W2 or social security/railroad income, plus <1500 in interest. No itemizing deductions.
I still prefer to guess how much I owe based on the various forms I likely fucked up
Lol can you guys not lodge your own tax online..
You can submit online, but the actual filling out of forms is just PDF files that you work through as if they are paper.
There's a huge market for price-gouging online tax services that walk you though filing taxes in a simple way. They've been lobbying against this kinda of government-run filing system for a long time.
And the most insulting part is that a lot of that stuff could be pre-filled because the IRS already has the information, but because of all the lobbying you have to fill it yourself. It's literally pointless work that should have been eliminated ages ago thanks to technology.
This is honestly insane. Australia has had online lodgement for I donno 15 years. Your employer salary/bonuses/tax withheld, private health insurance if you have it, welfare payments including unemployment, family tax benefits and child care rebates, Australian paid dividends including franking credits etc and probably more are all sent to the ATO and preloaded into your lodgement. If you have no deductible it honestly is as easy as logging in, enter your bank details(which wil be saved for next year) and click submit.. even if you do have deductions it basically holds your hand working out each one and in some cases has built in calculators, like one example you put in how many km you drove a car and it fills out the deduction.
It even gives you a very accurate estimate on your refund or outstanding tax.
While that is true there are already a ton of free services available and have been for years. Don't think I've paid to file federal or state in over 10 years. Granted this is if you have a pretty simple return, if you have a ton of deductions most services will charge you to file those forms.
Looks like Intuit could not bribe enough people.
Hm, Washingtonians might be eligible... Gonna have to remember to check my eligibility next year.
We've had this for almost two decades in Australia.
Wow, I'm extremely excited to see how this pilot goes. Hopefully well so people don't have to continue to pay to get their taxes done.
As you submit your biometric face data... Pretty sure turbo tax didn't make me scan my ID and take a selfish / video conference.
I dunno. Is it more secure, or is it a hack waiting to happen?
For 23: myfreetaxes.com
I just wish it supported all of the forms I had to fill out. I'm forced to pay a tax guy a few hundred because of it.
I hate and love turbotax. Its affordable compared to a tax person and Im tyoically done in a few hours. Ugh.
Turbotax doesn't support these forms either, tbf. Hell, even tax guys almost never see it.