6 ms·

Is H&R Block doing sponsored posts on HN now?

perl4ever 8y ago
10% would be excessive if it were typical for the general public, I would agree. But not so much for a tiny subset with high earnings and particularly complex affairs. It doesn't make one the moral equivalent of children locked in cages.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >But not so much for a tiny subset with high earnings and particularly complex affairs. I think this is where I think we're talking about different things. It does not only affect people with high earnings. It affects all US citizens working abroad - including those who didn't exactly choose to live abroad. Again, I'm not talking only about double taxation. I'm talking about the need to file (which is true even if you earn $20K/year in a Latin American or Asian country). In my other comment to you I gave examples of fairly ordinary people in other countries who will be considered as US citizens under current tax laws who are legally bound by the US to do all that paperwork every year. As someone else pointed out, if your income is over $11K/year, you have to file. Run a small store that barely pays the bills? You have to file. Do some stock transactions and gain/lose money? You have to file. Just think of everything you have to include in your tax form (if you are in the US). Then think of all the tax docs you receive annually. You need to create all those tax docs yourself - including the ones you don't include with your return (in the US, the agency that issued the document already reported that info to the IRS). I got all these docs from various agencies even as a low earner in the US - this is definitely not about high earners.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    "think of all the tax docs you receive annually. You need to create all those tax docs yourself - including the ones you don't include with your return" I find this inconceivable - it sounds absurd, because (a) not all income is reported on those forms anyway, even US based, and (b) fabricating them yourself eliminates their purpose as a means to prevent tax evasion. What's the IRS going to do, say "well, you tried to file a tax return with 10K euros of income, but we didn't get a W-2, so you're in deep trouble now"? Are they going to add to that 10K or subtract from it? If you are a US adult who has filed tax returns for a few years, I would expect you to have some experience paying taxes on income that wasn't independently reported. Surely you don't fabricate the documents that are normally sent by the income source, when they aren't present. I just don't believe that is a thing that is done. I feel like my leg is being pulled here.
    - BeetleB 8y ago
      >I feel like my leg is being pulled here. Most of what I said is a simple Google search away. This will be my last comment: >I find this inconceivable - it sounds absurd, This is a fairly poor metric for evaluating the veracity of anything. >because (a) not all income is reported on those forms anyway, even US based In my experience, most forms of income in the US have been categorized. If you made money, there very likely is some appropriate form you should fill out. How much information the IRS needs about it varies amongst income types. As an example, I sold stuff online for a short while - did not make much money, but the volume was large (probably in the hundreds of items in one year). When I looked into what I needed to report for tax purposes, I was hoping it would be a simple case of 1. Costs of goods 2. Revenue made, and tax on the net. Nope: I found it fairly burdensome. Had I paid a tax person to do it, I would have spent more on the tax professional than my net profit (which really was very low). >If you are a US adult who has filed tax returns for a few years, I would expect you to have some experience paying taxes on income that wasn't independently reported. Surely you don't fabricate the documents that are normally sent by the income source, when they aren't present. No one said anything about "fabricating". If the agency doesn't provide you one, you provide that information to the IRS in some way or other. Sometimes it will literally be filling out the same form. In other cases, the IRS will have a schedule for you to fill out. Perhaps the W-2 was a bad example. I know someone who sold a property he owned outside of the US. The income generated from the sale had to be reported and capital gains tax had to be paid. Now in the US when you do this, some party (I believe the seller's agent) gives you a simple form which you should attach to your tax return. Since this was a foreign transaction, the other party gave no such form. He considered just reporting it as an investment without that 1099. He consulted some tax folks, and they told him that he should do that, but while the IRS may look the other way, legally he is obligated to fill out the form and attach it. The problem was he did not have access to all the figures needed to fill out the form. They advised him to fill out what he could and likely the IRS will accept his explanation. I personally have had to deal with the IRS - as others have commented, while it always does seem to work out, they can be very annoying. In my case, I was claiming education credits. Some years after I left school, they wanted proof. It took several back and forths to get them off my back, and the experience was quite negative. They continually said "Yes, if you give us such and such information, it will suffice," and when I gave them said information, they kept saying "Not enough - we want more proof". Had to reach out to the university for help, and they were quite surprised - they said they never had to give out as much information as I was asking for students to get those credits, and I was lucky they still had the extra information that I was requesting. So yes, perhaps usually the IRS will accept the explanation for missing information in forms you can't get because you don't live in the US. But it's not a guarantee.

10% would be excessive if it were typical for the general public, I would agree. But not so much for a tiny subset with high earnings and particularly complex affairs. It doesn't make one the moral equivalent of children locked in cages.

BeetleB 8y ago
>But not so much for a tiny subset with high earnings and particularly complex affairs. I think this is where I think we're talking about different things. It does not only affect people with high earnings. It affects all US citizens working abroad - including those who didn't exactly choose to live abroad. Again, I'm not talking only about double taxation. I'm talking about the need to file (which is true even if you earn $20K/year in a Latin American or Asian country). In my other comment to you I gave examples of fairly ordinary people in other countries who will be considered as US citizens under current tax laws who are legally bound by the US to do all that paperwork every year. As someone else pointed out, if your income is over $11K/year, you have to file. Run a small store that barely pays the bills? You have to file. Do some stock transactions and gain/lose money? You have to file. Just think of everything you have to include in your tax form (if you are in the US). Then think of all the tax docs you receive annually. You need to create all those tax docs yourself - including the ones you don't include with your return (in the US, the agency that issued the document already reported that info to the IRS). I got all these docs from various agencies even as a low earner in the US - this is definitely not about high earners.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "think of all the tax docs you receive annually. You need to create all those tax docs yourself - including the ones you don't include with your return" I find this inconceivable - it sounds absurd, because (a) not all income is reported on those forms anyway, even US based, and (b) fabricating them yourself eliminates their purpose as a means to prevent tax evasion. What's the IRS going to do, say "well, you tried to file a tax return with 10K euros of income, but we didn't get a W-2, so you're in deep trouble now"? Are they going to add to that 10K or subtract from it? If you are a US adult who has filed tax returns for a few years, I would expect you to have some experience paying taxes on income that wasn't independently reported. Surely you don't fabricate the documents that are normally sent by the income source, when they aren't present. I just don't believe that is a thing that is done. I feel like my leg is being pulled here.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    >I feel like my leg is being pulled here. Most of what I said is a simple Google search away. This will be my last comment: >I find this inconceivable - it sounds absurd, This is a fairly poor metric for evaluating the veracity of anything. >because (a) not all income is reported on those forms anyway, even US based In my experience, most forms of income in the US have been categorized. If you made money, there very likely is some appropriate form you should fill out. How much information the IRS needs about it varies amongst income types. As an example, I sold stuff online for a short while - did not make much money, but the volume was large (probably in the hundreds of items in one year). When I looked into what I needed to report for tax purposes, I was hoping it would be a simple case of 1. Costs of goods 2. Revenue made, and tax on the net. Nope: I found it fairly burdensome. Had I paid a tax person to do it, I would have spent more on the tax professional than my net profit (which really was very low). >If you are a US adult who has filed tax returns for a few years, I would expect you to have some experience paying taxes on income that wasn't independently reported. Surely you don't fabricate the documents that are normally sent by the income source, when they aren't present. No one said anything about "fabricating". If the agency doesn't provide you one, you provide that information to the IRS in some way or other. Sometimes it will literally be filling out the same form. In other cases, the IRS will have a schedule for you to fill out. Perhaps the W-2 was a bad example. I know someone who sold a property he owned outside of the US. The income generated from the sale had to be reported and capital gains tax had to be paid. Now in the US when you do this, some party (I believe the seller's agent) gives you a simple form which you should attach to your tax return. Since this was a foreign transaction, the other party gave no such form. He considered just reporting it as an investment without that 1099. He consulted some tax folks, and they told him that he should do that, but while the IRS may look the other way, legally he is obligated to fill out the form and attach it. The problem was he did not have access to all the figures needed to fill out the form. They advised him to fill out what he could and likely the IRS will accept his explanation. I personally have had to deal with the IRS - as others have commented, while it always does seem to work out, they can be very annoying. In my case, I was claiming education credits. Some years after I left school, they wanted proof. It took several back and forths to get them off my back, and the experience was quite negative. They continually said "Yes, if you give us such and such information, it will suffice," and when I gave them said information, they kept saying "Not enough - we want more proof". Had to reach out to the university for help, and they were quite surprised - they said they never had to give out as much information as I was asking for students to get those credits, and I was lucky they still had the extra information that I was requesting. So yes, perhaps usually the IRS will accept the explanation for missing information in forms you can't get because you don't live in the US. But it's not a guarantee.