Legalized bribery

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.
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
- 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
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 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Politicians get their jobs through an eagerness to bootlick capital.

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.
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.

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.
- 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

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.
- I think they mean the government corruption. How cheap it is to buy votes. You can buy a Supreme Court justice with an RV.

And if you're in France, don't use TurboTax, use the official government website that calculates everything for you reliably every year :o
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.

Then stop accepting wealth in your country. You accumulate the capital of the whole world inside your country and then expect them to be there for any other reason than to control the policy there?

Make it make sense

Thankfully genocide joe opened up free taxes to everybody and put those leeches out of business!

\s

It is funny that it's only an issue in Lemmy that Trump is doing it. Meanwhile the IRS has been stuck doing this for decades because of corporate lobbying from Intuit.
This as much of a regression to about 2023. When America was already behind on tax filing since the 1980s compared to every other country. Even the "shithole" nations Trump hates have had better tax systems for their citizens.
- https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/intuit-inc/recipients?toprecipscycle=2024&id=D000026667&candscycle=2024

Put every manager of TurboTax in prison as a traitor.

Or just put a cap on donations and block corporate donations?
- I think people have to understand that we've entered a different era. The rich have gotten richer and become insanely powerful and "the game" has gone on for so long all the rules have been slightly bend to allow them to become more rich and powerful. If you continue to "be sensible" and ask if you may nibble around the edges, all you get is fascism. It's inevitable. So first you have to destroy them and their power, then you can reform the system. Reforming the system now, even if you could, won't do anything.
- that would have been reasonable 20 years ago.
Crowdfund the airfare to El Salvador?

The rich pay what they want while the workers must pay what the rich want.

every time this comes up i am flabbergasted.

this year was my most complicated tax filing yet since i was involved in a bankruptcy, switched jobs, bought a house, contracted work on the house which was eligible for tax credit, and got an inheritance within the span of a few months. it took me almost 20 minutes to do, which was basically only because the tax agency don't package their various calculators in the pre-filled form and i had to double-check the credit thing.

it drives me mental, then i hear about "tax month" and i feel it could be worse.

This might be way too personal but did you declare bankruptcy because you were expecting the inheritance? Pretty smart. If your debt was high that's like free money. It seems this has to be the case if you filed for bankruptcy and then bought a house. Most people who don't have to file bankruptcy will never afford a house.
- no, the company i worked at went bankrupt.

i see people are greedy and dumb so they vote one of two parties and pretend it is a democracy? nancy pelosi will rule longer than the elisabeth IV. i fear. did any human order airstrikes in more countries you are not at war with than obama? both parties are nationalistic and selfish like their voters. and thats why it is doomed to fail. both parties cam be seen as collapsed. republicans are taken hostage by maga and dems so crooked they should stop calling themselves democrats.

Sure, Timmy is stabbing you repeatedly. And last time he gave it a bit of a twist. Which looked painful.
Bht remember when Great slapped you?
Yeah. Sounds like both of these people are terrible.
Now if you excuse me, its my turn to get stabbed. So excited.

Note: this plan may result in IRS mandated prison time from unpaid taxes
Decreasing the exemptions increases the amount of taxes withheld.... For most people your advice as written just means letting the govt keep your tax refund every year.
Unless you're wealthy enough to afford a bevy of attorneys, they will still go after you.
Shit, they'll probably start using AI to determine who the easiest targets are (spoiler: it's always the working class).

I honest to God can't imagine how fucking cheap the price for them to make it so that people have to use their paid services... which will make them many, many times more than their bribe ever was.

It would be like if you paid me 1 dollar and I did something that would make you 200 or 300 dollars...

1 million to make filing taxes annoying af, well I'm not filing anything again

Well that is just a tip of the iceberg.

What do u think his digital currency was for?

Corpos buy currency, he sells his coin, he does whatever corpos want, done.
Corpos write off as failed investment, Trump gets paid.

All digital currencies are for some shit like this - fraud.

Lobbying bad when Trump

Lobbying is a bipartisan issue my friend.
Don't you remember how genocide joe spent the past 4 years shutting down all these lobbyists?
\s

is there a fact check on this? seems wild to me. wonder what the maga cult defense is on this one.

wonder what the maga cult defense is on this one.
Here ya go: HRC drinks baby blood.
https://www.newsweek.com/american-businesses-supporting-donating-donald-trump-list-2027957
They are in there and a few days ago Trump announced they were ending the direct file program.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-administration-plans-end-irs-direct-file-free-tax-filing-sources-rcna201663

The joke might be in there as while AI cannot do your taxes today, we are hopefully not too far off.

Thanos wearing a redcoat

💂 "And where did it bring you..."

Anyone else starting to think since Trump likes Putin maybe he too would like to gather all of the nations wealth for himself and his leeches. Seems like they'll get all the money and kick backs and business and we're left with even less, causing us to work more and get less.

That's entirely the point of all those tariffs. Raise taxes on everybody without calling it that.

In the trump Reich

Everything is for sale.

Everything

Jfc

Hypocrite warmongering Robbie Reich forgets to mention Intuit Inc always pays more than 70% to Dems.

If you believe everything should come with a price, you should vote for those who will give you the most money for voting for them, which is probably the democrats.

Hooray for the spoils system

Intuit ~~donated~~ invested $1million

Is he just doing all this through executive orders?