IRS:
You gotta do a bunch of math, and if you fuck it up, you go to jail
if you fuck it up, you go to jail
No, no you don’t. This is an actual child’s understanding of how it works.
If you fuck up they often don’t even notice unless it’s substantial, otherwise they just send you a notice. You have to be willfully refusing to pay taxes for a while, repeatedly, before you’re in trouble (tax evasion) or commiting actual tax fraud.
Why would the IRS send you to jail for making mistakes on your taxes? Where taxes are now paying for your incarceration, and you can’t work to make the income to pay taxes.
“why do you think I stopped you today?”
I don’t know, do you?
Murica wild as always
Vote for people who will increase funding to the IRS so they can manage all this.
The reason it’s been like this for so long is because they don’t have the manpower or (until recently) the technology to handle the sheer numbers. Lobbying from TurboTax and shit also played a big part, but even without that, they straight up can’t afford to do all this when they’ve been strangled of funding from decades of conservative legislation.
Yes but no. They have the numbers already reported to them for most of us. A proper database and front end would spit out the magic number. So it’s a one time project that they can’t fund because of lobbyists. Other countries have had this for decades.
Love the meme but JFC I wish they would just send us a simple invoice (or refund) every year. You know, the way adult nations do things.
In Germany they just keep the money they think you owe them up front. If you think you owe less you have to send in a report proving it. If you owe more (e.g. from cash income) and they find out, you’re punished.
It’s insanity. I’m sure there’s some rationale for it, but it seems like it could be so much simpler.
They’re working on it. They had a pilot program in several states this year.
That’s just for free tax filling software, i.e. a government sponsored TurboTax alternative. And that was definitely needed.
What they’re talking about is not having to actually do the filling at all, or at least only having to file in certain cases. The government pays for employees that look at your stuff, says “that’s the amount”, and asks you to confirm.
Granted, with the way tax filing software has advanced, and how simple the vast majority of people’s filings are going to be, the difference is not very substantial anymore. The majority of people just need to click through the screens and answer the questions, so it takes a little time but it’s hardly a true hassle.
The reason it’s been like this in the US for so long is because of the heavy lobbying to keep software like that proprietary and the system complicated enough that people need to use it.
But it’s also been because of decades of conservative bullshit refusing to fund the IRS to the degree that they could provide the services that other countries get. IRS literally could not and cannot afford the manpower to handle the taxes of every American for us. Software lets them circumvent that.
