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Most of it is prefilled in my french declaration. I had to check a box saying that I don't own a TV (so I don't have to pay that tax) I also had to connect t

Most of it is prefilled in my french declaration. I had to check a box saying that I don't own a TV (so I don't have to pay that tax) I also had to connect to my home cleaning service website in order to know exactly how much I paid them in 2017. That's pretty much it, everything else was already filled. Since my employer has declared that I worked for them (I mean .. that's the case for most people except black market), the FISC (french IRS) already knows how much I made that year. If you are freelancing, or another regime different from full time job in a company, it might be more complicated. but for 90% of the people, you connect to the gov website, approve your taxes and that's it. US has federal and state taxes. Both are obscure. AFAIK, there is no government website to do your taxes. No prefilling either of course. So I had to google a lot, look for my w2, etc. I used hr block since it looked easier than figuring out everything myself. It was still more of an headache than my french taxes and I don't think that it was only because of my expat status.

dominotw 9y ago
> there is no government website to do your taxes. i was curious about your comment > Even after paying 180 dollars to HRBlock, my US taxes were way less straightforward and took me hours. I used turbotax for both state and federal it imported and prefilled my adp w2 and imported my tax account from etrade.com. It took me 10 minutes to finish it.
- on_and_off 9y ago
  To sum it up better : you don't need turbotax at all in France. http://www.impots.gouv.fr/ http://www.impots.gouv.fr/ . (it would be taxes.gov.us here ) already has all the prefill that all these services have. I guess it can always be argued that maybe corporations are more cost effective than a government. We would need to compare the figures though, in France corporations don't spend millions bribing the government in order to do abandon the idea of improving the tax system.
  - dominotw 9y ago
    yes I agree with you completely but thats a totally different argument than your original comment > Even after paying 180 dollars to HRBlock, my US taxes were way less straightforward and took me hours.

dominotw 9y ago

> there is no government website to do your taxes. i was curious about your comment > Even after paying 180 dollars to HRBlock, my US taxes were way less straightforward and took me hours. I used turbotax for both state and federal it imported and prefilled my adp w2 and imported my tax account from etrade.com. It took me 10 minutes to finish it.

on_and_off 9y ago
To sum it up better : you don't need turbotax at all in France. http://www.impots.gouv.fr/ http://www.impots.gouv.fr/ . (it would be taxes.gov.us here ) already has all the prefill that all these services have. I guess it can always be argued that maybe corporations are more cost effective than a government. We would need to compare the figures though, in France corporations don't spend millions bribing the government in order to do abandon the idea of improving the tax system.
- dominotw 9y ago
  yes I agree with you completely but thats a totally different argument than your original comment > Even after paying 180 dollars to HRBlock, my US taxes were way less straightforward and took me hours.