you don't need to pay someone hundreds of dollars to someone who has made a career out of the tax system. You don't. Your employer does [+], because they are r

you don't need to pay someone hundreds of dollars to someone who has made a career out of the tax system. You don't. Your employer does [+], because they are responsible for (for the majority of traditionally employed folks) managing your tax returns for you. The prices are, indeed, in the hundreds of dollars per year. If you do something exotic in Japan, like (to pick an example entirely randomly) sell bingo card creation software over the Internet, you will get intimately familiar with the 青色申告, which is almost exactly as much fun as a US tax return. My personal tax compliance cost for last year on the Japan side was ~$2.5k; it's cheap at the price because doing a full return given my situation would likely have eaten a solid week. [+] There are some economies of scale here, but a startup in Japan should budget several hundred dollars for payroll administration, per month, plus another lump-sum due in December for the spike of work caused by the end-of-year adjustment (which is not a tax return per se, but is the closest thing most Japanese people have to a tax return). There are some irreducibly complex questions in tax, such as the surprisingly difficult "What is income, really?" and the related follow-ups "What type of income is that income given that we've decided we want to treat them differently?" and "When exactly did that income happen, given that we've decided we want to run taxation in an other-than-continuous fashion?" These questions are complicated and nuanced because the economy is complicated and nuanced.