Taxes!

i’m lucky to be able to afford someone to do this for me, as every year i get about $3k back. if it was me doing it i’d either 1) not do it 2) mess it up or 3) spend so long on it that i may as well have paid someone to do it in the first place

133 pages this year. Great system.

Filed in mid-February, got my NJ refund yesterday, which is me cutting my last tie to that state. I are an Montanan now.

Been in the US since last spring, went to see a tax advisor yesterday as we have a slightly confusing set-up with one partner working full-time and income also coming in from a couple of different UK sources. Left the meeting vastly more confused than when I went in, which seems par for the course with accountants going by past experience. Bloody hell I thought dealing with the Inland Revenue was bad!

compared to the inland revenue it is ... unbelievably bad.

Oh jeez Matt#2. This is your first go around then? It is profoundly unpleasant (and expensive).

Been in the US since last spring, went to see a tax advisor yesterday as we have a slightly confusing set-up with one partner working full-time and income also coming in from a couple of different UK sources. Left the meeting vastly more confused than when I went in, which seems par for the course with accountants going by past experience. Bloody hell I thought dealing with the Inland Revenue was bad!

Oh jeez Matt#2. This is your first go around then? It is profoundly unpleasant (and expensive).

American taxes are so dumb. Last year I made a mental error and ended up owing a couple thousand, so I predictably overcorrected for that this year PLUS I didn't account for a couple of changes in our favor — standard deduction went up, IRA contribution limits went up, plus most significantly also our health insurance went from us paying for it ourselves through the marketplace to my wife getting it through work, which means it now comes out pre-tax.

All of which means that even though we on paper made more money this year than last year, our taxable income went down while I boosted my estimated tax payments — so now after owing money last year it looks like we're going to get the biggest refund of our lives this year. Which MAYBE I could've anticipated if I spent more time thinking about all of this or thought about it more than once a year, but anyway it's a dumb system.

And now I'm afraid the big jump in refund will somehow get us audited, but whatever, I think I could survive that.

Every single state and national politician in the USA loves to tinker with the tax code. The result is a mind-boggling complexity that never repeats itself from year to year. The forms keep shape-shifting, the instructions are baroque, credits come and go with bewildering rapidity.

I've kept our financial life as boring and vanilla as it possibly could be and I keep comprehensive records. But I finally gave up doing our taxes because I never knew for sure that the some new wrinkle had been inserted deep into the instructions, so I had to relearn the procedures every year. The tax software helps, but now I just hand it over to a preparer and wash my hands of the whole mess.

I plugged along on my own for some years but I remember Elvis Telecom telling me in the start of the 2000s I should really go for a tax guy. After I realized a couple of long-standing errors in approach that I'd been doing for some time a few years later, I took said advice and frankly I'm all the better for it. My situation is certainly less complex than some but it's not easy plug and play either, and frankly I'll always be reassured knowing someone else's name is on the return as well as mine.

For awhile there weren’t very many changes tbh (between 2000 and 2016) … the last 7 years have been chaotic in comparison. The “evil software companies” love to advertise how many changes there are and how it is just so much that you really need to pay for their software…. the reality is that the vast majority of the changes to the tax code don’t affect the average person’s tax return. Also, as a professional tax person, I have now come around to the concept of the free file, pre-filled click and submit thing for people whose taxes are simple. Like if everything you are taxed on and can deduct is reported to the IRS already, and there isn’t anything else… you shouldn’t have to pay for help or software or spend much time dealing with it.

I can nerd out about it but … yeah, it is dumb

The stupid Trump Cock Jizz Act of 2017 was the biggest set of changes since 1986 … and it has a lot of really stupid provisions that need to go away ASAP

I do my own and it’s medium complex (a bunch of 1099s, plus Burning Ambulance is an LLC) but nothing I can’t handle. People act like taxes are like slide-ruling a mission to Mars but they’re really not IME.

stockholm syndrome

they really did become much more complicated a few years ago for me, but luckily i only have one 1099 this year, so absent some colossal fuckup on our healthcare advocate’s end, we won’t owe money this year— last spring, we got a new coat put on the roof and also owed the IRS $1300 because we made more money than we had predicted on our healthcare forms. doesn’t sound like much but it basically ruined the next four months of our lives.

gonna have to do the installment plan this year :(

It's not impossible to figure out what needs to be done to fill out one's taxes, just detailed, time-consuming and very tiresome. For example, Oregon's lawmakers keep adding credits, then removing them, or changing the qualifications. A few years ago the OR Dept. of Revenue revised their basic tax form from 2 pages to 4 pages. When the big federal tax changes were passed at the tail end of December 2017 it caused states to make cascading revisions to counteract the many punitive features the Republicans inserted just to pwn the libs in the NE and west coast. So, have fun!

People act like taxes are like slide-ruling a mission to Mars but they’re really not IME.

Very much depends on circumstances I think. Mine are more complicated since becoming self-employed, though still not excessively so. We do standard deduction, but if you're in an itemizing-deductions situation, that gets more complicated too. For all the years my wife and were just getting employer W-2s and a little bit of freelance income, yeah, that was easy-peasy.

I have the extra simplicity of living in a state with no income tax. Big change from my NYC years where there was federal, state AND local.

Oregon is a challenge as far as states go, you are otm Aimless. And then there is the Multnomah County form on top of that…

made it

Uhm, for the first time in a long time, we haven't received the refund we are supposedly owed, despite it being more than three weeks (or 21 days) from being submitted. Truly afraid they're gonna audit us, even tho we have little to no money and have been struggling for the past year and a half.

Have you checked the status of the return on the IRS/state website? That will tell you if the refund is processing.

It has been received and is processing.

It was "accepted" by both state and federal the day after I filed, which was a Sunday.

It’s more common to get a correction letter than be audited… like way way more common. Lmk if anyone is interested in hearing more about this… I seriously don’t want to take up space with this stuff if no one gaf

You're in the right thread, have at it

I am deeply interested

Full scale audits are too expensive to impose them on us little people.

I'm in a slightly weird spot myself -- not the end of the world -- where my initial returns went in, but I only got partial refunds back; turns out my preparer -- who I've used for many years! -- missed a bit of coding, so had to send in amended returns. The remainder from the state came back in a week but I haven't seen anything yet from the feds, and given all this there's no way I can immediately track the progress of that amended return. (Unless I'm missing something? Any advice welcome! But larger point here -- table, you're not the only one seeing a delay, so I wouldn't fret here.)

xp lmao it's like if chatgpt got an ilx login

https://trac.syr.edu/reports/706/include/figure2.png

I tried the new free Fed online filing system... just 100,000 used it, so I feel special. We'll see if my refund actually shows up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_YMrHssFXo

that’s what i used too

Full scale audits are too expensive to impose them on us little people.

So … the things that could happen that not getting your refund in 3 weeks could indicate:

1. It might show up next week because of their processing cycle.
2. The IRS thinks there was a mistake:
2a. The IRS fairly primitive computer system matches what you report on your tax return to what others have reported as having been paid to you or received from you.
2b. The IRS rarely gaf if you fail to report student loan interest paid or take a deduction for mortgage interest… so usually it’s an income side mismatch.
2c. If you failed to report income of a type they have on record that you received or if you reported less than what they have on record that you received, they will most likely send you a correction letter.
3. This is a classic pass-agg document that says “you said this” … “however we think you should have said that. If you disagree, file an amended return or contact us, otherwise we will assume we are right and you owe us money.” The document will also come with instructions how to pay them what they think you owe.
4. Sometimes they are wrong.
5. Unless you agree with their corrections, it’s often best to file an amended return because there are potential deductions in relation to the income that the IRS is not going to calculate for you.

Ime the most common things the IRS catches and sends correction letters on are:
1. Unreported self employment income
2. Investment income that is in your name but a relative deals with the account and you don’t have the paperwork sent to you so you often forget it exists (see also: aging parents)
3. Unemployment income for short periods of time
4. Cashing out a retirement plan or life insurance policy from a former job especially if there was hardly any money in it to begin with
5. A w2 from a job you quit in January that you forgot about and they sent it to an old address

6. Investment income from a stock plan from a company you no longer work for because brokerage firms will often not report the basis of employer stock so when you sell it it shows the cost basis as 0 and it looks like you made a huge profit

The IRS fairly primitive computer system

every year I get a letter from them about 1099s and it's like "Sorry, but the name doesn't match the SSN#" and invariably the name DOES match the actual SSN# but their 1953 scanners read the name and/or SS number wrong

We had an issue where the IRS kept saying we owed money that had already been paid long before. We had the receipts and everything, yet every two to three months we went through the cycle of getting a letter in the mail stating we still owed the money > logging in to see that indeed the payment had been made but was listed as "processing" > waiting on hold for two hours for a rep to confirm we had been paid and no need to worry, the system was just lagging behind due to the pandemic backlog > getting another letter stating we owed the money > rinse and repeat for about 16 months before it was finally resolved.

Ugh … sorry.., I mean I don’t work for the IRS so it’s not my fault but

_The IRS fairly primitive computer system_

every year I get a letter from them about 1099s and it's like "Sorry, but the name doesn't match the SSN#" and invariably the name DOES match the actual SSN# but their 1953 scanners read the name and/or SS number wrong

hey guys did you know I'm so baller that in addition to working my full-time job, I made $14,000 in non-employee compensation from DoorDash in 2022?

Me neither! but the IRS seems to think I did!

(i'm not actually even stressed, I'm giggling .....clearly someone fucked up)

i may have questions for this thread as I report this obvious mistake.

Did someone steal your SSN# or something?

i think if someone outright stole it, I'd have noticed before now. but I am checking my credit report just in case.

feel like it's more a case of someone who was keying in an SSN made a one digit error, but who knows.

apparently this is a thing that has happened to other people though:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IRS/comments/18rk1gu/someone_used_my_wifes_social_for_doordash/

Yeah, it's not like DoorDash requires you to show the actual SS Card - you can probably tell them any old number

years ago I worked at design firm and we briefly had a contractor from eastern europe.. I kept asking her to complete the W-2 (she claimed her SSN# was 'private') and when she finally handed it back to me, her SSN# was XXX-XX-1234 .. literally 1234 were the last four digits. Huh, what are the chances of that?

CONFIRMED - IDENTITY STOLEN.

looked at the transcripts and you can see the address that Doordash had for me is one I've never had in history. this should be a fairly easy process to dispute as I can prove on my own credit report I've never lived there. have set up credit freeze and fraud alert on my account. have all of the forms ready to go.