why is it the US is hellbent on making everything a state by state issue but at the same time saying federal law is above state law in such cases like Texas but states with legal cannabis or states with legal abortion are allowed to be above federal
is the US the United States or not
make it make sense
The things that the federal government is responsible for are laid out in the Constitution, everything the Constitution does not place into the responsibilities of the federal government is left to state or local authorities.
Tenth Amendment:
Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.
that old thing desperately needs to be rewritten
You trust the politicians of today to rewrite the whole thing? They can’t even agree on a budget.
Before or after a guillotine is set up outside the place where they’re drafting it as insurance?
make it make sense
We’re a slightly tighter coupled EU with less history of separation. We’re states that are united. Not one big ol unified country.
IDK why people are downvoting you, that’s essentially how it works. Everything is super interconnected now, but it wasn’t always that way and the constitution hasn’t been updated to reflect it.
Not one big ol unified country.
What’d the frats chant when we killed Bin Laden? ;)
“more poon now!”
Frats are probably not the best go to for people educated on the country lol
It’s 50 states in a trench coat
50 countries, but yeah
A state is just another term for a country. The two words never meant something different until our American Union got some people confused.
That’s a fair point. I was mostly sticking to the colloquial usage.
The idea of checks and balances on the exercise of government powers extends to even the state/federal relationship.
Why did this take the IRS so long where other nations have been doing this for decades?
Lobbyists - quite disgusting.
Same reason why our Healthcare system is fucked, it being fucked helps the Insurance Companies make money.
Turbotax, H&R Block, and the other tax companies are massively wealthy companies that actively lobby to push laws to keep them from being simple. There are states that they have managed to bar the same thing from happening in.
To clarify, TurboTax isn’t the company, it is Intuit. They are pretty shitty when it comes to lobbying congress on this.
TurboTax isn’t the company, it is Intuit.
Technically, it was a company that Intuit acquired in '94.
They are also the de-facto place for large companies that need automated payroll. So some people (like me) get paid by the same crooks.
Legalized corruption 😎
The other guy linked the answer, but I’m going to explain it anyway:
In the US, companies have the freedom to
bribelobby our congress members by giving them money that’s totally unrelated to their vote you guys. The reasoning behind that being ok is that the congress official in question is still technically free to vote however they choose despite the money given to them. The reason lobbying works is the threat that the congress person might not get that money next time if they vote against that company’s interests.Just so you all know, because our congress members make a government salary of about 150k-250k/year, it’s surprisingly cheap (from a rich company perspective) to lobby them, with lots of payments being in the low thousands. So for obscenely wealthy companies (like intuit), it’s much cheaper to pay just enough guys off to kill a movement than for them to suffer the actual consequences of that movement.
In this case, intuit’s entire business model depends on American taxes seeming like this mysterious and unapproachable thing that Americans have to pay a third party for in order to not get thrown in jail by the IRS. And given that intuit (and companies like H&R block) rake in billions each year, it’s comparatively pennies to pay off congress officials to keep it that way.
-> 'Merica
Most nations don’t require you to do anything other than check your payslips unless your situation is complex.
Ehh, in the Netherlands you need to report all bank accounts, home value, income from salary and contracts and a fuckton more.
It’s all done via a web app made by the Tax Authority.
Hmmmm 🤔
I can’t wait until this is available in my state!
Somebody think of the poor corporations!
Damn only like 20 years behind the rest of the world.
Couldn’t hear you over the sound of my freedom
…nevermind, that was somebody rolling coal
I guess canada is 21 years behind now…
can’t use it if i got my health insurance through obamacare? -_- fucking bullshit
I can’t use it because I live in the wrong state. Truly some fucking bullshit.
To be specific, this is a pilot program, with the full launch coming later.
Ya last year 50 states worth of all insured and uninsured people dealt with evil tax prep companies :)
How could they launch this and not support login.gov for the auth…
No Login dot gov
No support in most states
No ACA filers
No app payments
Lots of reason to be frustrated. BUT! This is an absolutely delicious blow to the Intuit lobbyists and if it can handle the simplest of the simple, think of the green light they’ll have towards eventual global parity!
Been so bad (and evil) for so long, I’m in the mood to celebrate more than nitpick. (No Login dot gov I will say is the funniest thing not to be considered MVP - understandable but funny.)
It’s in beta. I’ll take it
Just a heads up it’s only available for the following states:
Arizona California Florida Massachusetts Nevada New Hampshire New York South Dakota Tennessee Texas Washington state Wyoming
Yeah, bummer. I’ll have to wait I guess.
so the most populous states, and somehow, 2 in the bottom 5.
Testing the outliers?
mmm, scientific!
Surprised Texas is in that list.
Which is funny considering this is only for federal and not state taxes. Do they say why it’s limited to specific states?
Most of the listed states do not have state level income taxes. The only exceptions are Arizona and California. The rest of the states have no state level income tax. Alaska is the only state without a state level income tax that isn’t included in this IRS scheme.
I imagine there is a reason all but two of the chosen states lack a state level income tax.
State taxes are probably an additional complication in the calculations that hasn’t been implemented yet for all states. And for those without a state income tax not covered, probably some other state-tax-adjacent thing
Massachusetts does. Per the IRS site, the tool won’t help file it, but will lead you to another tool that does.
It’s a trial program, to work out the major kinks, issues, and problems before rolling it out further to other states.
It’s also federal-only, meaning you still have to do your state returns. Most of the states in the trial have no state income tax, which makes it an ideal solution for taxpayers in those states.
Expect it to expand to all 50 states in the coming years, presuming Republicans don’t somehow manage to legislate it into oblivion like usual.
If they have no state level income tax how do the states get money for things? Do they just tax businesses?
Sales tax, property tax, lottery also
As a non US citizen this is just a Robin Williams in Jumanji moment…
WHAT YEAR IS IT?!?!
Anyways, welcome to the year of the interwebs.
Have you got rid of your cheques and faxes yet? 😉
interwebs
It’s called “the information superhighway”, thank you very much. 😄
The Great Series of Tubes
It’s not a big truck you just dump something on
Saw that on Netflix, addicting.
This must be true since I read about it on the line.
I thought I had gotten rid of cheques, but I had to get a book specifically to get my passport.
Faxes… No, no we have not gotten rid of them. On the other hand, that means shenanigans are still available!
Not true - faxes are widely in use in Healthcare due to hipaa rules
Okay, I said we’ve not gotten rid of them? But the good news is you can do shenanigans like fax Dad Jokes to random fax numbers…
Oh, I misread your comment, my bad.
my wife is disputing a Healthcare charge. Went to a specialist 13 times, they reimbursed us 9 times but not the other 4, at a cost of about $800.
we have to communicate with the appeals center by fax, and wait for their snail mail response.
At some point she should just stop jumping through their hoops and file in small claims court.
I still write checks, mostly to pay contractors and tip my hairdresser. I wrote a tip for a contractor the other day and made it out to cash. He said that was too old-school and he was afraid the bank wouldn’t accept it!
I still write 2 cheques a year because my water bill can only be paid via physical mail (or in person I guess), I’m pretty sure fax is still common in our medical industry.
I’d use Bank of America bill pay or something similar, they will print and mail your check.
What is it with water departments being such Luddites?! Having lived in a few different cities in a few different states, they always seem to be the one utility that’s the biggest pain in the ass to work with. Gotta go down to their city office to start service - make sure to bring a voided check if you want to set up an auto draft to pay the bill because they don’t take cards. Online account management? Nah, the closest they have to an online presence is their About page on the city website.
WHY?!
Do you want to pay more just to get all that up and running though?
Utility prices keep going up, regardless. I’d rather they use the money for something useful.
This is why I like credit unions that offer bill pay. They can print and mail the check. :)
somewhat common but dropping.
I’m in the USA and we’ve been able to file our federal taxes for free online for like a decade, I’m not sure what these people are talking about. What’s new here is that this is the IRS’s official tool.
Previously we had to use an outside service – but it was – and still is – free for normal people/people with normal taxes (eg I have 3 kids and a mortgage and I use it every year). State taxes are another story – that’s usually about $20. And that probably hasn’t changed; state taxes have nothing to do with our IRS.
Except for the last several years it’s becoming harder to file for free. TurboTax’s free service developed some worse and worse dark patterns every year, where it was very easy to click the wrong thing and end up being charged. Iirc the fact that they provided a free service at all was to keep control of the market and prevent the IRS from stepping in with a service like this. ProPublica did some good investigations on this.
Beat me to it.
Higher tax bracket Lemmings, note that Donate icon in the upper right of their excellent reporting. Reporters probably risking their lives with the stuff they uncover about the most powerful people.
Oh we can file our taxes online, we’re just required to pay massive amounts of money to a corporate middleman to do it.
Oh we can ___, we’re just required to pay massive amounts of money to a corporate middleman to do it.
Basically America.
18F looking for tax filling help
k if u single but looking to file jointly 👉👈
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use it, since it doesn’t list capital gains as a supported type of income
Unless that’s also related to it being a pilot
No matter what is planned right now, if this isn’t a PR disaster but the opposite and all the direct filers are gleeful about it, I think it’ll be good enough publicity for them to broaden it to most any use case.
CPAs with a million times more insight may need to correct me there though.
I’m sure it’ll support everything the irs accepts eventually
I’d be down with a system that literally just says, “This is what we have on record for you, would you like to file this or dispute it?” Considering they get copies of all your tax documents.
That’s uhhh… That’s corporate America for you.
Yeah. Hey was your username previously (if abbreviated) SMCF?
Nope. It comes from an old Army nickname for mortarmen.
Ah OK! There’s another user with Maggoty in their name then. Yours is much much tamer :)
I’m 100% for a simple IRS tax return but what the heck is with this?
To use Direct File, you need an IRS account with ID.me.
To get an ID.me account, you need to:
Take a video of your face
If you can’t or don’t want to take a video of your face, you can have a video call with an ID.me agent who will confirm that your face matches your identification.
Is that really necessary???
In the UK, we typically have to do two forms of identification - usually a passport and a driving licence.
I imagine that for many Americans, they don’t have a government issued id, whereas basically every Brit will have a driver’s licence for id so they can go out drinking.
I don’t know any American adult who doesn’t have a government issued ID. You basically can’t do anything without one.
I imagine that for many Americans, they don’t have a government issued id
That’s only the case in a few select cities, like New York. Most other people have an ID of some sort. (And, even if you don’t want a driver’s license, it’s still possible to get a government-issued ID that doesn’t let you drive but still verifies your identity.) The US is huge. It takes at least a few days to travel across it. And most of it, especially out in the Midwest, is still pretty rural.
As for the “two forms of ID”, they actually require four types of documents (though some documents can be submitted for two or more of those things; at minimum, you need two documents total), at least in my state, when you first get a driver’s license. So most places will simply use your driver’s license by itself since it proves that you’ve already proven your identity. Anywhere that does require two proofs will usually use your social security card and your driver’s license.
IDs are super common in America, it would be unusual for someone to not have one.
Stupid fraud prevention ugh!
Listen folks, if you have a driver license, they already have your face, so settle down.
countries with no national ID cards and no plans for one: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK. 1
And they do taxes just fine without a Harry Potter like gif of every tax payer.
Privacy reasons aside, TurboTax doesn’t require a video clip to file your taxes so this is only raising the technical barrier against the widespread adoption of a simple tax system.
I don’t mind this being done through the government site, but it shouldn’t be done by a third party business.
You’d think a social insurance number would be enough…
Social Security number WAS NOT made to be an ID. It’s not a secure unique number, it’s just serial.
Oh I didn’t know that. It kinda works like that in my country
In a country with proper citizen identification it might be (but even then, doubtful).
It’s the same as going to a bank and letting the teller look at your face. It’s to prevent someone from stealing your identity using a picture of your ID.
How can they verify the ID is real without physically seeing it? They look up the info but still need to verify that you are the person on the ID.
How have they been verifying mailed in tax forms with no pictures for decades?
Seems like it unnecessarily disenfranchises the poor and the elderly. You have to have access to equipment that can record you and the tech savvy to be able to use it.
They can do that with a drivers license like they have for the last few decades.
And they’re using face recognition from a for profit corporation. Not ok. I’ll continue to use their freefillable forms option, but if they discontinued that I’ll just go back to paper mailing. This is not a step forward.
https://cyberscoop.com/irs-facial-recognition-identity-privacy/
I’m pretty sure you’re required to provide your driver’s license info at some point during the sign-up process, actually. Though it’s been a while, so I don’t remember for sure.
If it’s like I remember, it’s to confirm that the person on the ID matches the person who’s signing up. Banks do the same when the teller asks for your ID. And so do the people who ask for your ID when you go to vote. It’s the same basic process. It’s just digital instead of in-person.
Ok but how come H&R Block doesn’t need to do this? I just give them my IRS PIN and the AGI from last year’s return. The picture shit feels like a poison pill
For anyone who has filed with it, how much does this return differ from using a company? Is your total return the same or can a tax professional get you back a significant amount more?
You get as much back as you would if you knew what to claim.
If you have a simple return then it should be identical. There’s only one way to fill out form 1040 correctly. Its unclear if this will walk you through itemizing or more obscure deductions like other places do.
Due to lack of public identity infrastructure, filing taxes online in Britain takes a long time. I mean, at least 10 minutes 😄
It takes at least that long for me to figure out if I was a Lloyds underwriter on the second Tuesday after the third waxing moon every year.
