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One economist went on a long whimsical journey to pay his taxes with cash
- etothepii 4y agoGovernments tend not to think of their citizens as customers but subjects.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoThat was far less onerous than I expected.
- DangitBobby 4y agoHaving to make 1 appointment is unacceptable, let alone 2.
- deathanatos 4y ago… especially because of the reason given. If your rules stipulate that on days upon which you accept money, you require a courier, and you schedule a meeting to accept money on that day … then you should have a courier on that day. It's not rocket science.
- bsder 4y agoReally? Multiple appointments and different people refusing to take the payment isn't onerous? Sure, it's fine for an economics professor who has lots of time and can take off in the middle of the day to schedule and then drive and then get rescheduled and then ... This is hell on Earth for someone who works hourly from 9 to 5. And it's absolutely stupid. Either banks should be authorized to take such payments or the post office should be authorized to take such payments.
- cuuupid 4y agoInteresting article but it sounds like all the author had to do was schedule an appointment and wait 30min. Also the conclusion is discouraging: rather than make self payment easier, the IRS easily has the information available to estimate and deduct taxes as they are due automatically or via an easy online form. Turbotax and other providers lobby against this for good reason, because with TurboTax you still have to input information and calculate taxes whereas with the IRS they have the data available already. The conclusion I drew from this article is the most annoying and tedious part of this process was manually calculating taxes well in advance, which I’d be willing to bet took significantly longer than the commute to the IRS office + 30 minute wait.
- DangitBobby 4y agoThe article mentions that they were "lucky" because in many places throughout the country, the physical location they would have needed to visit would have no available appointments until after taxes were due. Further, it wasn't a 30 minute appointment, it was a 30 minute appointment made well in advance, after which they (illegally?) _refused refused cash payment_, followed by another 30 minute appointment a week later. Except it wasn't timeboxed to 30 minutes because they didn't bother to tell them (or didn't know) how long it would take to make this simple transaction. Notice your options are to 1) have a bank or 2) use non-traditional digital means which all charge some form of "convenience fee" or 3) suffer major hassle to pay cash without surcharge.
- giantg2 4y agoDo you technically need a bank? You should be able to head to the post office or Walmart and pay with a money order.
- xyzzyz 4y agoMoney orders are $1000 maximum, and they have fee of $2.40, so you might need to pay couple of dollars extra depending on how much you owe.
- jalk 4y agoHe didn’t tell us how much he spent on parking and gas to go to the IRS office twice.
- eesmith 4y agoThe downtown Boston tax office is 2.5 miles from the author's workplace. He could have walked, biked, or taken the MTA, which would be free if it already had a monthly pass. The MTA planner says it takes 21 min at the fastest. So for him, it's likely the transit cost was $0.
- jsnell 4y ago> If the government wants everyone to pay their taxes, why doesn’t it make it as easy as possible? Seems like they do; those easier ways are "not with cash".
- MrStonedOne 4y agoNot everybody is allowed to have bank accounts.
- giantg2 4y agoBut anyone can buy a money order at Walmart or USPS.
- anonym29 4y agoOut of curiosity, who's excluded? I have several close personal friends who are not in the country legally (not US citizens, no SSN, no US state issued driver's license), and banks bend over backwards for them - they have fewer KYC requirements to open accounts than I do, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little jealous about that.
- techsupporter 4y agoIf you've ever done something to get yourself added to the unholy nightmare that is Chexsystems, you're either excluded (if you are in a metro with a small number of financial institutions) or you have a lot of hoops to go through to get an account. There's no requirement to open a basic functionality demand deposit account, like found in the Eurozone, so it's up to financial institutions to decide who they will and won't accept. For example, there's a credit union near me that advertises second-chance checking accounts. The account costs $7 per month and you have to take a $25 personal finance literacy course (that wasn't offered during the pandemic).
- tadfisher 4y agoIt might actually be easier for recent immigrants to get an account, because they have no history with ChexSystems, the _de facto_ credit bureau analogue for banking history. When working for a technology company offering retail banking services (in a past life) the #1 reason for denying an account was a negative ChexSystems report. That means the applicant has had checks bounce, held a negative balance for too long, or was suspected of identity theft/fraud (often they were victims, sometimes unknowingly).
- retrac 4y agoHere in Canada, taxes can be paid in person at a retail bank, or the post office.
- msla 4y ago"Whimsical" now means "making pointless work for yourself and everyone else" and seems rather close to "speed-running" ("slow-running"?) a bureaucracy for social media clout. Really, really pitiful social media clout.
- Supermancho 4y agoIt did read like a very short treadmill session, with lots of ancillary info to fill out the exercise.
- photonbeam 4y agoHow did people do this before electronic payments?
- yarg 4y agoWith cheques.
- ksherlock 4y agoWrite a check and mail it in.
- pavon 4y agoAnd that is how I still do it to avoid paying processing fees and giving up my tax information to some third party who uses dark patterns to try to get you to share your private tax information with marketers.
- retrac 4y agoOthers have already mentioned cheques, and those were standard for most non-urgent matters. But in a loose sense, electronic payment has been around for quite a while. 50 or 100 years ago, a business with a large, outstanding tax debt might well pay it by wire transfer. Basically a cheque done quickly by telegram, later telex, then computerized. And it's still around apparently -- the Canada Revenue Agency says I can pay my taxes from abroad by wire transfer.
- Symbiote 4y agoMaybe the answer is more interesting in Europe, where electronic payment systems existed long before smartphones and the WWW. You would probably pay by giro, very commonly used to pay utility bills etc. The tax office provides a pre-printed machine-readable giro slip, which looks similar to a cheque but includes your tax number and amount owed (or electric company account number etc). You take that to your own bank, and they transfer the money from your account to the tax office's account -- originally this might be partly by post, but at least the printed slip is much more machine-readable than a cheque. I think by the 1980s the slips were no longer posted around, the payment was electronic. Of course, you could take cash to pay in to your account at the same time. You could also take the giro to a post office, and pay in cash. Or you could write a cheque and post both the cheque and the giro to the giro processing centre. I think postage was free. The in-person parts of the system still exists, though I think the post-a-cheque bit has gone. It remains the default way to pay a bill (including a tax bill) with cash or without using a computer. Before that, I don't know, since before the giro system most people in the UK didn't have bank accounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro_(banking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro_(banking) Picture of a current giro slip, at the bottom of the bill: https://bionic.co.uk/business-energy/guides/business-energy-bills/ https://bionic.co.uk/business-energy/guides/business-energy-... The MP proposing the system in Parliament in 1965, noting it already existed in most western European countries: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1965/jul/21/postal-giro-service https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1965/jul/... -- "this is a simple system of credit transfer which can be operated through our network of 23,000 post offices throughout the country ... All these giro clearing houses are linked together by Telex machine".
- AlbertCory 4y agoA LONG time ago, I was at a (small) company that shared a building with a phone company office. I was amazed at how many people paid their phone bills in cash.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoYep. Middle class people don't really get all the ways that being poor is a detriment. You often don't have credit, and you may not have a bank account, so you get paid in cash, or at the last minute by check, forcing you to use a check cashing store, which will rape you on unnecessary fees, siphoning any cash you might have saved, keeping you poor.
- mrguyorama 4y agoLook at how much money is made in industries like Check Cashing, debt "recovery", payday loans, and prepay debit cards and you might start to understand what it means when people say "being poor is expensive".
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoWriting a book on the advantages of using cash is like writing a book on the advantages of using human waste as fertilizer. Even if there is some advantage, I'm pretty sure everyone would just rather not.
- galago 4y agoWe totally do though... https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/03/30/boston-massachusetts-pfas-forever-chemicals-sludge-deer-island https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/03/30/boston-massachusetts-pf...
- irrational 4y ago> If the government wants everyone to pay their taxes, why doesn’t it make it as easy as possible? Uh, they do make it as easy as possible, as long as you aren’t trying to pay in cash. Even the description of how to pay with cash sounded as easy as could be expected.
- ggm 4y agoAlthough now a semi privatized corporate, the Australian Post Office remains a licenced receiver of debts to the government and will accept cash over the counter toward a payment for tax. The clearing mechanism is pretty good here. I cannot help wondering if the pretty ludicrous inter-bank processes of the USA are the anomoly which causes a lot of this. The whole situation around bank cheques, moving money between institutions remained (I cannot say it remains, it may have been fixed now) far long than in other economies. We all wear 3 days clearing for historical reasons, even though you can do most funds transfer in under a minute (transferwise does international in under 5) but I continued to hear about people walking into small local financial institutions with a bank cheque from inter-state and having to deal with major "you aren't from round here" creaking door, stunned silence banjo sound-track localisms. The last time I had one of those experiences was in 1982 in the UK when I mistook an islamic bank in Manchester for a classical british bank and tried to cash a cheque on sunday. I really should have thought why that door was open when everyone else was closed (they are banks, licenced financial institutions, but they are emphatically NOT banks as we think of them, especially around interest debt, and a cheque is a kind of promissory note, a debt instrument)
- judge2020 4y agoThe Federal Reserve is rolling out FedNow in July[0], which should enable instant payments, so instant transfers between accounts will be possible as more banks adopt it and more systems prefer it over ACH / wire. It still requires exchanging ACH credentials (routing and account number) so you won't see things like card terminal payments using it anytime soon. 0: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/other20230315a.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...
- ggm 4y agoThe Australian Banking sector went with a thing badged dually as both "OSKO" and "PayID" which recognises phone numbers and email addresses for person-to-person and was sold as lightweight person-to-person, probably the space Venmo is in. Out of the blue I now see the same payment vehicle when I ostensibly use another pre-existing mechanism we have here called BPay: you identify you want to use some prior clearing framework with ID "a" and it internally has mapped it to ID "b" in the other (presumably cheaper) payment framework. Sold as p2p and being used for bill paying to institutions. But like your one, not card level: account level, app driven, I think at this point given I'd say "meh" because its my money, no matter which card or account its from.
- gumby 4y ago> If the government wants everyone to pay their taxes, why doesn’t it make it as easy as possible? Various people in congress want it to be complicated so that people will be even more unhappy about paying taxes.* This is the same reason states require sales taxes to be specified separately and one reason VAT/GST has been repeatedly rejected in the US. * I am not unhappy about paying taxes. I get a lot of services more cheaply than I would through the private sector (and some that make no sense to be privatized)
- 7thaccount 4y agoThat and massive lobbying from TurboTax and similar companies. There is also concern that millions or at least hundreds of thousands of accountants would be out of work.
- p1necone 4y agoI really want to see what would happen if the "taxes are theft" crowd actually lived in a society without taxes. I suspect they'd go maybe a couple months before they were like "hey we should pool money together to fix the potholes in the roads". And eventually they're going to form something that looks a hell of a lot like a government, and they're going to have to collect something that looks a hell of a lot like taxes. And then give it a couple of generations and you'll have a brand new bunch of human house cats crying "taxation is theft". Which is why the only practical thing to do with libertarians is to ignore them.
- TechBro8615 4y agoHow long until they start burning through $1 trillion a year on military airplanes that don't work?
- p1necone 4y agoThe sane reaction to that is "hey our government kinda sucks, we should change it via (voting/protesting/a coup/a revolution)" or if you're a bit more cynical "hey our government kinda sucks, I'ma start working on getting citizenship/a visa somewhere else". Not "hey we should live in magical fairyland where nobody collectively organizes anything but I still get to live almost exactly as I do now". (Also potentially workable: "hey our government kinda sucks, I'm going to go and live on a commune with a small enough number of people that we can actually coexist based on general kindness and goodwill")
- dotcoma 4y agoCome try to do it in Italy, if you really like a challenge! ;(
- Animats 4y agoFor small payments, the IRS accepts cash via Dollar General, Family Dollar, CVS Pharmacy, Walgreens, Pilot Travel Centers, 7-Eleven, Speedway, Kum & Go, Royal Farms, Go Mart, and Kwik Trip. That's their solution for people with no bank accounts.
- judge2020 4y agoThey talk about this in the article. There's a fee that you pay, and apparently it isn't as simple a process as depositing cash into your fintech bank account via CVS/Walgreens/etc.
- dax77 4y agoThe author mentions the possibility of retail banks filling this role, and they already do the reverse—if you have a paper US Savings Bond, it can be redeemed for cash at almost any full-service bank branch. They are already deeply-involved in FedWire, the ACH Clearinghouse, and other payments rails. There’s also one in almost every neighborhood across the US.
- shagie 4y agoSame article - different source (its the one linked from his twitter feed): https://theconversation.com/i-tried-to-pay-my-taxes-in-cash-heres-what-happened-and-why-the-irs-should-make-it-easier-to-do-so-203282 https://theconversation.com/i-tried-to-pay-my-taxes-in-cash-...
- m463 4y agoCalifornia has some law that if you pay more than certain amount, you have to do it electronically or there is a 10% fine
- singron 4y agoCalifornia also has the reverse limit on electronic filing. If you make more than a certain amount, you have to mail in paper forms.
- stackernews 4y ago[dead]