5 ms·

Same in France. But I am going to play devil's advocate here, did you get the "best deal"? It all comes down to deductibles. In France, the "one click taxes"

by GuB-42 5y ago

Same in France. But I am going to play devil's advocate here, did you get the "best deal"? It all comes down to deductibles. In France, the "one click taxes" option assumes 10% of your salary is deductible, which is often a good deal but sometimes, it may actually be more, especially if you have a long commute. The government app won't help you with that. It may not help you with incentives too. For example, you may get some tax rebates if you did some work to improve the energy efficiency of your house, what exactly you can declare? And charities, loans, etc... A good accountant may help you save a significant amount with all these details. Tax software are like a middle ground between simple, no brainer, government issued "one click" tax filling and hiring a professional accountant. Note that in France, most self-employed people hire an accountant, proper tax filling can be a minefield if you are not an employee. And by the way, that's Intuit's argument. That it is used to justify its evil deeds is a thing, but the argument itself is not without merit.

tinco 5y ago
I'm Dutch as well. A couple of years ago my university fees were made tax deductible, I'm hazy on the details but basically I dropped out of my masters degree to work on a startup. Normally if you finish your degree some of your costs are relieved by the government with some loan forgiveness scheme. After 5 years or so they decided I definitely wasn't finishing that degree and all my university costs were suddenly tax deductible. Obviously I had no idea of this scheme, I have no accountant and my university fees of 5 years ago were far from my mind. Randomly got €6000 euros income tax back, very nice windfall courtesy of the Netherlands government.
- EE84M3i 5y ago
  That seems like a surprisingly large amount of money. I thought university wasn't that expensive there (enough that the deduction of the income saved 6000 euros on taxes). Did you mean it became a tax credit and you just got all the money you paid in fees back?
  - tinco 5y ago
    Yeah it was all of it for three years, education costs are 100% deductible, so if it was 3 years at 2000/yr (standard university rate back then) it would be 6000 total. I forgot the exact amount because in that same year I also bought a house and there's a bunch of tax deductibles there as well, I think I got back over 8000 in total that year. Normally the final dues are a lot less, probably 0 for people who have no mutations and a regular job. I had to pay 300 euro this year because I did a single freelance gig on the side. edit: Note that this is probably a very exceptional situation. Normally college students don't make enough money to be paying taxes in the first place, I had the perfect storm of having all the deductibles being applicable in a single year, and making a good wage that year. I'm just telling this story because it's an example of the system randomly giving me the sort of tax benefit even a dedicated accountant might have missed, just because it system applied its rules to all the information it has about me.
    - EE84M3i 5y ago
      In the US that's called a "tax credit". A "deduction" is something that reduces the amount of income used for tax calculations. So I thought you meant you got 6000 back because your university fees became deductable. At 25% tax rate, that would be 24,000 in fees. It sounds like you got a tax credit.
      - tinco 5y ago
        Hmm, you're right. So there's one thing I didn't mention and that is that my income was abnormally high that year because I was bought out of the company I resigned from. Pushing me into the 50% tax rate territory. This might have made the deductibles that much more significant. I would have to look up the exact numbers to know for sure.
yunohn 5y ago
> did you get the "best deal"? From my experience with the NL tax system, next to nothing is deductible. Very straightforward taxes, they take 51% of all personal income. ;)
- ninja3925 5y ago
  If this figure is true, do you see the symbolism of it as I do? It's not 49%, where the individual will still work mostly for themselves but 51%, where the state owns the majority of the labor for each individual. I find this number chilling.
  - tinco 5y ago
    The figure is not true, it used to be 51% for income above a certain amount (I think 60000?) but now it's 49,50% for income above 68000. Even when it was 51%, you would have to make more than 500,000 for the total taxes to be exceed 50%. Anyway, what's chilling about it? You're phrasing it in a very weird way, the state doesn't own labor. It is due taxes for its services rendered. The Netherlands is ridiculously rich and the government takes very good care of its citizens. I think it's hard to imagine for Americans how much value we get from our government. Traveling from The Netherlands to the states. Even your richest cities have poor people hungry, suffering and distressed just camping around everywhere. I'm not saying we've got it perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the deal we got.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      The 500k figure is quite misleading. Sure that’s for 51%, but anything over 100k, it already exceeds 40%. That’s still a huge number. There are tons of poor and hungry people in NL, and the gov is actively hostile to homelessness. There’s lots of municipal corruption, and central inefficiency. I know lots of Dutch citizens who are in student debt, and very few families who can afford to buy a home before 35. It’s a fallacy that somehow this is the /the/ tax rate that can provide for citizens. There is no magic number, and we can always demand more efficiency.
      - 5y ago
surge 5y ago
I believe the way it works here (US), is most people with the standard deduction works for probably 80-90% of cases because their finances aren't complex enough or they're not doing enough where the deductions exceed the standard. So most would be fine with government just telling you what you owe/they owe and you just signing off or making a correction. If you're doing a lot of charity donations, real estate, student loan debt, saving receipts for work related expenses, calculating depreciation on assets, etc, then its worth it, but by then you probably have a personal accountant doing it for you, not a program.
- Moto7451 5y ago
  Also factor in the removal of the State and Local Tax deduction. Prior to that I ended up writing off my CA taxes instead of taking the standard deduction. I’ll save my personal political ranting for a different space. Addressing the GP, yeah our system has been messed with by the tax prep companies. One year I had a complicated (for me) tax situation and I hired a CPA. They managed to make a mistake that lead me to overpaying by thousands. The IRS was nice enough to mail me a check. The IRS clearly has enough info to run a European style system. We (as a country) just underfund the IRS and have special interest vested in maintaining the status quo. Clearly those special interests are doing a great job if someone with a state certification and professional tax software can mess up the math. A friend had the same issue with this past tax year and owes a balance plus penalties. She has every intention of paying her taxes. Why does our system make it hard for her to do so? There’s no good reason why we should have to chance these situations. We should just be able to pay our taxes correctly at time we are paid and move on.
  - GFischer 5y ago
    It's not only Europe. I live in Uruguay and I got an SMS to check if my auto-filed taxes were correct, if I do I have the option to make changes right in the government website. And the local IRS has the best paying software development jobs in the government, so they actually have decent software (although they could do with some more UX people).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
benhurmarcel 5y ago
And yet all those deductions are possible in France. You make it sound like they'd be impossible to claim with that system.

by GuB-42 5y ago

tinco 5y ago

I'm Dutch as well. A couple of years ago my university fees were made tax deductible, I'm hazy on the details but basically I dropped out of my masters degree to work on a startup. Normally if you finish your degree some of your costs are relieved by the government with some loan forgiveness scheme. After 5 years or so they decided I definitely wasn't finishing that degree and all my university costs were suddenly tax deductible. Obviously I had no idea of this scheme, I have no accountant and my university fees of 5 years ago were far from my mind. Randomly got €6000 euros income tax back, very nice windfall courtesy of the Netherlands government.

EE84M3i 5y ago
That seems like a surprisingly large amount of money. I thought university wasn't that expensive there (enough that the deduction of the income saved 6000 euros on taxes). Did you mean it became a tax credit and you just got all the money you paid in fees back?
- tinco 5y ago
  Yeah it was all of it for three years, education costs are 100% deductible, so if it was 3 years at 2000/yr (standard university rate back then) it would be 6000 total. I forgot the exact amount because in that same year I also bought a house and there's a bunch of tax deductibles there as well, I think I got back over 8000 in total that year. Normally the final dues are a lot less, probably 0 for people who have no mutations and a regular job. I had to pay 300 euro this year because I did a single freelance gig on the side. edit: Note that this is probably a very exceptional situation. Normally college students don't make enough money to be paying taxes in the first place, I had the perfect storm of having all the deductibles being applicable in a single year, and making a good wage that year. I'm just telling this story because it's an example of the system randomly giving me the sort of tax benefit even a dedicated accountant might have missed, just because it system applied its rules to all the information it has about me.
  - EE84M3i 5y ago
    In the US that's called a "tax credit". A "deduction" is something that reduces the amount of income used for tax calculations. So I thought you meant you got 6000 back because your university fees became deductable. At 25% tax rate, that would be 24,000 in fees. It sounds like you got a tax credit.
    - tinco 5y ago
      Hmm, you're right. So there's one thing I didn't mention and that is that my income was abnormally high that year because I was bought out of the company I resigned from. Pushing me into the 50% tax rate territory. This might have made the deductibles that much more significant. I would have to look up the exact numbers to know for sure.

yunohn 5y ago

> did you get the "best deal"? From my experience with the NL tax system, next to nothing is deductible. Very straightforward taxes, they take 51% of all personal income. ;)

ninja3925 5y ago
If this figure is true, do you see the symbolism of it as I do? It's not 49%, where the individual will still work mostly for themselves but 51%, where the state owns the majority of the labor for each individual. I find this number chilling.
- tinco 5y ago
  The figure is not true, it used to be 51% for income above a certain amount (I think 60000?) but now it's 49,50% for income above 68000. Even when it was 51%, you would have to make more than 500,000 for the total taxes to be exceed 50%. Anyway, what's chilling about it? You're phrasing it in a very weird way, the state doesn't own labor. It is due taxes for its services rendered. The Netherlands is ridiculously rich and the government takes very good care of its citizens. I think it's hard to imagine for Americans how much value we get from our government. Traveling from The Netherlands to the states. Even your richest cities have poor people hungry, suffering and distressed just camping around everywhere. I'm not saying we've got it perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the deal we got.
  - yunohn 5y ago
    The 500k figure is quite misleading. Sure that’s for 51%, but anything over 100k, it already exceeds 40%. That’s still a huge number. There are tons of poor and hungry people in NL, and the gov is actively hostile to homelessness. There’s lots of municipal corruption, and central inefficiency. I know lots of Dutch citizens who are in student debt, and very few families who can afford to buy a home before 35. It’s a fallacy that somehow this is the /the/ tax rate that can provide for citizens. There is no magic number, and we can always demand more efficiency.
    - 5y ago

surge 5y ago

I believe the way it works here (US), is most people with the standard deduction works for probably 80-90% of cases because their finances aren't complex enough or they're not doing enough where the deductions exceed the standard. So most would be fine with government just telling you what you owe/they owe and you just signing off or making a correction. If you're doing a lot of charity donations, real estate, student loan debt, saving receipts for work related expenses, calculating depreciation on assets, etc, then its worth it, but by then you probably have a personal accountant doing it for you, not a program.

Moto7451 5y ago
Also factor in the removal of the State and Local Tax deduction. Prior to that I ended up writing off my CA taxes instead of taking the standard deduction. I’ll save my personal political ranting for a different space. Addressing the GP, yeah our system has been messed with by the tax prep companies. One year I had a complicated (for me) tax situation and I hired a CPA. They managed to make a mistake that lead me to overpaying by thousands. The IRS was nice enough to mail me a check. The IRS clearly has enough info to run a European style system. We (as a country) just underfund the IRS and have special interest vested in maintaining the status quo. Clearly those special interests are doing a great job if someone with a state certification and professional tax software can mess up the math. A friend had the same issue with this past tax year and owes a balance plus penalties. She has every intention of paying her taxes. Why does our system make it hard for her to do so? There’s no good reason why we should have to chance these situations. We should just be able to pay our taxes correctly at time we are paid and move on.
- GFischer 5y ago
  It's not only Europe. I live in Uruguay and I got an SMS to check if my auto-filed taxes were correct, if I do I have the option to make changes right in the government website. And the local IRS has the best paying software development jobs in the government, so they actually have decent software (although they could do with some more UX people).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

benhurmarcel 5y ago

And yet all those deductions are possible in France. You make it sound like they'd be impossible to claim with that system.