this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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Funny: Home of the Haha

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submitted 2 days ago by Stamets to c/funny
 
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[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 days ago (1 children)

And the problem is that it is not trivial at all to calculate the right number. I think it is wrong for the government to force such a hard problem on all of their citizens, including the ones with low education.

It is so screwed up that in the past I got a letter from the IRS saying my accountant made a mistake on my stock sales and I owed several thousand dollars. My accountant made the calculations again and showed that the IRS actually owed me $60. I never heard from them after that.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Yeah, I agree with you that the general population shouldn’t have to do their own taxes with the technology that basically everyone now has.

The only 2 reasons I can think of to keep it this way are 1) people doing their own taxes results in at least some of them reporting random self-income and results in a non-trivial amount of extra tax dollars, or 2) tax preparation companies have captured legislators’ votes and the tax prep companies would lose shitloads of money if tax prep was a government responsibility.

¯\(ツ)

[–] SpaceNoodle 17 points 2 days ago

It's (2), and (1) is just a bonus for them.

[–] Maggoty 9 points 2 days ago

It's number 2.