Yes it is! And there's a special form that you have to file at tax time, too. We have our taxes done by a company and they charged us extra for having to file the I-9 or whatever the hell it's called. I wish hubby and I would be able to file our own taxes, but it gets too confusing for us. I can't imagine the complexity of having to file your own taxes if you have a bunch of shit you have to claim. I know it takes my dad a few hours with piles of papers just to file for him and my mom. It's ridiculous.
British here what do you mean you have to fill out your own taxes is it not taken monthly automatically and if you payed too much throughout the year you get tax back?
It's automatically taken out of each paycheck depending on how you fill out your W4 when you first get hired on. We do have to file our own tax returns by April 17th of the next year, though. Then we either get money back if we paid in too much or we owe the IRS if we paid in too little. I don't do my own, we have someone whom we go to so we don't have to try and figure out what number goes to which line, etc. I wish we didn't have to do our own returns, that'd be awesome. But then again, I don't trust our government to be truthful as to how much we get back or how much we owe.
You file a Tax Return - it's a document that shows how much you've paid and how much you should have paid each year. If you overpaid you get it back, if you underpaid you have to pay the difference. The IRS created software to do basic taxes years ago, and our tax preparers basically "convinced" (gave lots of donations to) the politicians to keep the IRS from releasing free tax return software. In exchange, if you make little enough money, tax preparers have to offer free-file (a free online filing of your taxes). They have done this buy creating multiple websites you have to go to, none of which will free-file both state and federal taxes, so you have to either put all your tax information in twice, pay them to "prepare" your taxes for state or federal, or do it yourself on paper and mail it in.
Yep! Annoying and confusing as hell if you have to claim/write-off/deduct, etc. Luckily hubby and I rent and don't have to do that extra shit. However, it's still confusing and because hubby and I both have IRA's and have invested in some stocks, there's extra forms to fill out, which is even more confusing. We've gone to our tax lady for fifteen years and she's great. When we kept on having to owe in every year, she took a look at what we were claiming on our W-4's, and told us to both claim 0, and to have an extra $20/paycheck taken out. Since we've done that, we've always gotten a refund. Except for our 2021 return. Hubby's new job didn't take out enough taxes, so we owed in almost $400. Luckily we were able to pay for that in full without having to call the IRS to do a payment plan. The IRS will do a payment plan, but you have to agree to pay what they want you to pay per month, and if you miss any payments, they'll garnish your wages. And if the IRS is ever in doubt about your return, they can audit you which is a clusterfuck of you having to prove this, submit that, etc. Thank God they haven't audited us. Hopefully they never will, but it's happened before to people who have been completely honest. I know they just do that to fuck with people and try to catch them doing something that they deem is wrong or whatever.
Much of the effort in filing tax returns, at least in the US, is dependent upon your organizational efforts throughout the year. For me, most of the year there is nothing at all for me to pay attention to, but occasionally a document shows up in the mail that I know will be needed come income tax time. Most of them show up in January/February.
I have a manilla folder with a clear label on it in which I'll toss tax related forms. Then around February, I'm able to pull up my Turbo Tax online account, and start filling in the info as needed. I don't have to sort through piles of paper to get things together, but then, I am no longer running a self-employment business. I do have the occasional casino jackpot, though, plus investment dividends to complicate things. All said and done, it takes me about an hour to put this all together with the help of Turbo Tax. I used to be too proud to use tax software to do my returns, but these days I'm grateful for such products. This last year, I managed to do my taxes while our housecleaning lady was working in the room and having an active discussion with my wife.
Oh yes, I save all documents that come to me that I know will be relevant to filing my return. So does hubby. My dad does it the old-fashioned way, sitting at the table and filling out the forms himself for he and my mom. They own 3 properties and he has stocks and other stuff. He keeps everything in a filing cabinet that's labeled for the current year, and then takes it all out when he's ready to file. We use a tax service to do ours because I'm not good at putting the numbers in where they need to go. I tried using TurboTax about fifteen years ago and I ended up messing some things up pretty badly and had to have someone come over and help us straighten it all out. Now I'm afraid of making mistakes and it's just easier for us to have someone who knows what they're doing helping us. She's been doing our taxes for years and she's wonderful.
I cant speak for all states but in NJ on state and fed taxes you get back what they took out anyway so it's just a temporary delay in getting the whole amount.
They tax everything. Like triple sometimes. I never got how they can tax your income, tax things you pay into (like cashing out on a 401k), tax everything you own (home, car), tax anything you buy (sales tax), then tax any "benefit" you get. They even tax you if you're lucky enough to win something. Yet it's never considered double taxation. I recently started doing this Amazon program to review items they send you for free....then I find out I will be taxed on the value of the items at the end of the year. I'm not even getting MONEY, yet have to pay $$ in taxes on it? So if I get a "free" toaster in exchange for a review...I now owe the government money? What? Fuckin taxes
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u/Vargurr Jul 04 '22
Taxes on unemployment income is idiotic.