Thank You, IRS?

Uh oh, what does this mean???

Soon we’ll all find out if taxes are actually better or worse under the tax reform. No more speculation and misinformation. It’s easy to compare marginal tax rate yr/yr if you didn’t have any major life changes.

The answer will be different for everyone.

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For BA people not paying AMT last year they will likely pay more this year. And many didn’t have enough withholding. Payment shock for many.

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99% of America won’t feel sorry.

Quite a few states on east coast like MA and NY are on the same boat, and GOP got punished in midterms partly because of that.

It will only impact a tiny percent of people in those states. Most of SF should celebrate. It’s way better for renters.

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BS.
We did our taxes. We were better last year. We lost $500. That would be worse if it wasn’t for the $2K per kid.

My tax guy told me he has bunches of his clients waiting for a miracle from the democrats because they are losing so much money, and instead they have to pay, something they never did.

Losers are liars.

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:thinking:

Right choice of words? My understanding is tax avoidance is legal, tax evasion is not. So there are many financial advisors teaching you how to do tax avoidance. Some is employed by landlords like us. Deducting depreciation from rental income is a tax avoidance technique, perfectly legal. If tax avoidance is legal, how does tighter law enforcement reduces tax avoidance?

Frankly there is too much emphasis on freedom of choice and privacy. In Singapore, many of us hardly do tax return. IRAS receives data from companies and compute your tax, and automatically deduct from your pay regularly (mostly once a month). Every year, IRAS sent you a tax assessment for your verification - yes, IRAS does the work instead of you. Btw, you can opt out :slight_smile: and do your tax manually annually :slight_smile: Hence, there is hardly need for audit! for tax accountants! for tax checkers! IT works for us :slight_smile:

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Same in Germany. A German friend who moved here was just gobsmacked by our tax system.

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If the goal is 100% compliance, then the tax code should be as simple as possible and as automated as possible. No one knows what all 70,000+ pages say.

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No. The real solution is a super simple tax code. Then compliance is much, much easier to enforce. Even Tim Geithner did his taxes incorrect, and the IRS reported to him.

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We had this talk before but I totally agree with you. However there is no will to redo the whole tax code.

The IRS should be more popular. Democrats should like it because it bring more revenue for their programs and Republicans should like it because it’s about following the rule of law. The poor should love the irs. Tax refunds left and right.

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Did’t receive such a form. Thought is up to you how to fill up the tax form during submission.

IRS Fails to Pursue Thousands of Rich Tax Cheats, Watchdog Says

  • Report finds 879,415 high-income people didn’t pay tax bills

  • Budget cuts have forced agency to scale back enforcement

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-01/irs-fails-to-pursue-thousands-of-rich-tax-cheats-watchdog-says?srnd=premium

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that 879,415 high-income individuals who didn’t file returns cumulatively failed to pay $45.7 billion in taxes from 2014 to 2016 and that the agency hasn’t tried to collect from many of those taxpayers. The IRS didn’t put 326,579 of the cases into its enforcement system, and it closed 42,601 of the cases without ever working on them.

“In addition, the remaining 510,235 high-income nonfilers, totaling estimated tax due of $24.9 billion, are sitting in one of the collection function’s inventory streams and will likely not be pursued as resources decline,” said the report, released Monday.

…

Failing to collect billions of dollars in unpaid taxes has a cost to taxpayers who follow the rules. The average U.S. household is paying an annual surtax of more than $3,000 to subsidize taxpayers who aren’t paying all they owe, the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent oversight office within the IRS, found in January. The calculation is based on the assumption that the government is seeking to collect a fixed amount of revenue, leaving compliant taxpayers to pay more to subsidize noncompliance.

The IRS last year estimated the tax gap – the difference between what the federal government is owed and actually collects – averaged about $381 billion in unpaid tax from 2011-2013. That equates to roughly 14.2% of taxes never being submitted to the agency.