this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Isn't it actually better to owe rather than have a refund? Because if they owe you, then that means they over-withheld from you paychecks throughout the year and its essentially the government borrowing money from you without any interest.
In the Norwegian tax system, if you pay too much taxes trough the year from your paycheck, you get interest on the amount you paid to much. Likewise, if you pay too little taxes throughout the year, you will have to pay interest on the amount you have yet to pay. So the system is supposed to be balanced in that regard. The interest is on the level of a savings account (3.51% annual atm), so you could make an argument that saving that in a index stock or good bond is a better ROI though, so still recommended to try to not pay too much during the year.
The US federal government pays interest. The interest rates are quarterly.
I got paid interest on a tax correction & the rate was pretty good: over 5.5 APY, better than a high-yield savings account. I'll owe taxes on it, though.
Employers deduct a part of your salary as taxes on every paycheck (usually monthly). But how much they deduct is based on your tax profile which is created by the tax authorities. It's typically based on expected yearly income. However, you are allowed (and encouraged) to update this number yourself.
So say you swap to a lower paid job, or work less overtime than you planned, you can change your expected annual income to reflect this in taxes paid. If you don't however, then you effectively pay too much taxes as your employer is basing the taxes on too high numbers.
Another reason is that you may have tax deductions that only gets computed into the total when you fill out your full tax report. So if you didn't bake those into your tax profile at the start of the year, you might get returns on your taxes (with interest).
You can also downplay how much taxes to pay through salaries, in which case you will owe back taxes when the full tax report is made.
Interesting. I presume for the average adult this wouldn't really be an issue, unless they are switching job or working some kind of job with variable income. Unrelated question- do you like living in Norway?
Yeah, it's not an issue for most people. I think the system works well. And the annual taxes are very simple to fill out. The report comes filled out for you, and you just need to make adjustments or approve it as is. Never had any issues with tracking or reporting my taxes.
I really enjoy living in Norway. I feel the culture and the way of life suits my preferences very well. There are of course always things one hope improves over time and things that could be better. But overall, life is good here I feel.
I assume they have the same issues with waiting in the end of the year to round up stocks and other interest/dividend income.
Taxes can get extremely complicated depending on your situation. In my relatively simple case as a contractor, I'm on the hook for calculating and paying taxes quarterly (since my employer(s) don't do it for me). The exact amount I'm meant to pay is
yearly income/4, which means I need to predict how much I'll earn throughout the entire year, which is impossible without a crystal ball.So I just pay what I think I'll earn, and at the end of the year calculate the difference from what I actually earned, and either send or receive a payment from the government. From the IRS point of view, whatever interest they end up paying me is probably less than the cost of government having a cashflow issue throughout the year without those quarterly payments.