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Tax Time Again: Any Linux Solutions?
vettemph writes "As a Linux user, I've used Intuit's Turbo Tax On The Web in the past, but I don't like paying someone $20 to $30 to submit my forms. For the last few years I've been filling out the forms by hand and mailing them for $0.37 instead. Call me cheap. The IRS has a target of 80% of all taxpayers using e-file in the near future. Does anyone know where the 'free and open' solution is? Do we need to petition the IRS? Currently the IRS seems to be protecting their 'approved e-file partners'' profit margins in the name of a security layer. (I call shenanigans!)" So how will you be doing this year's taxes? I'd settle for a good PDF editor to neatly complete the IRS's PDF forms.
Just answer the damn question?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I'll take a break from Linux and boot into WinXP Home (which I bought a $89 OEM license for). I'll buy a copy of Turbo Tax from Walmart for $30 bucks and submit my return online.
It's not all or nothing. Windows is great for stuff like this. Don't let your ideology get in the way of cheap, efficient, widely avaiable software that'll make your life easier.
Living in France for a year in 2000-2001 I had to file for taxes there. They had this Java-based software (with instructions on using it on Linux) that did the trick. Well, I still had to use the paper output it generated, I think if you had Minitel or whatnot you could file online too. I was impressed :-)
:-)
Here in Finland they know how much you earn anyway since your employer tells them, so they send you a "tax proposal", which is correct for "normal" people and they don't have to do anything other than possibly pay more/get a refund if the deductions their employer made weren't accurate. Anything special (like profits made from sales of stocks and investment funds, assets etc.) you can, depending on your bank, print out the correct forms online which takes a few minutes, return those and that's it. Of course it can get complicated here too, but I manage in less then an hour
I don't like the IRS either, but the 16th amendment kind of disagrees with you.
English is easier said than done.
Sorry, i dont acknowledge anything above #10.
So, you still practice slavery? (#13) How about not allowing women to vote (#19), or having your Governor appoint your Senators (#17), or lowering the voting age to 18 (#26)?
Hell, you HAVE to support #27 -- not allowing Congress to raise their own pay during a session!
Are you really sure you want G.W. Bush running for a third term? (#22)
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
If you are getting money back then you should adjust your deductions so that doesn't happen.. Money should sit in your account rather than theirs.
With that in place since it's often extra to E-File just send the dead trees.. It's more of a pain for them to process it, and that gives them less time to find anything wrong with it.
What pisses me off more is buying an item that is labelled as .99 dollars, and ending up with almost a dollar in little coins. If prices had to be with taxes included, I'm sure a lot of the .99 cents would become .92 dollar or whatever would arrive at .99 dollars after tax.
I don't expect there to be a free Turbo Tax / Tax Cut equivalent. The idea of free software, as I understand it, anyway, is you make a program that you use, and you just give it to others because you think they may find it helpful.
This cannot happen with tax software. If you understand the tax code thoroughly, you're going to easily know exactly which forms to fill out in a specific year. And you would be an accountant, not a programmer.
Basically a programmer isn't going to sit down and write a program to do their taxes because by the time they know how to do their taxes, why would they write a program to do it?
This is why it takes a commercial entity to say "Ok, we have the know-how and the programmers to put this thing together, and we know people will buy it" -- god bless them because I've been using either Turbo Tax or Tax Cut for many of the past few years, and every time it has saved me money.
Certainly these companies can probably increase their sales a bit by making Linux binaries of their software, but don't expect them to give away the source to something they've invested so much $ in and depend on sales of to make money.
Coincidentally, I don't mean this post to be deragotary towards Open Source people, but am I wrong that no one is going to start a project for code that he himself isn't going to use?
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
All my earnings are reported, all my tax breaks pre-calculculated, interest reported by the banks. Only thing I have to add are tax deductible donations like Red Cross stuff.
It could Take me about 15 seconds to do my taxes.
I have NO privacy in my life, but it is not easy.
Really, Uncle Sam gets reports from everyone and "voluntary compliance" is a fiction. Even charities have forms to fill out.
My wife thinks they should have a web site that has the forms filled out and a little button, "I agree" or "make changes". The I agree button would take all of no seconds to push and Uncle Sam knows where my money is, so the next screen should present payment options. Make changes should let you enter things they might not know about, which would be rare, or let you file a complaint that a human being actually has to look at.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If you use a CPA, then you still have to pay the tax on any mistakes
Ok, so if they overclaim, you actually have to pay the right amount after all. Doesn't sound too horrible to me.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I have read all the documentation.
One could create open software to calculate taxes and spit out the forms with the appropriate blocks filled in. You would then sign the forms and mail them in the usual 'dead tree' fashion.
But there are so many hoops you have to jump through for your software to be allowed to offer electronic filing that a true open source alternative is simply not realistic. You can't just slap a program together using a certain data structure, throw it up on the net, and announce "Here it is, folks!"
For starters, if Joe Schmuck downloaded the source and recompiled it (whether he made any changes or not), the binaries would then have to be resubmitted and Joe Schmuck would have to then also jump through all those hoops.
The best one could do, given IRS regulations, is created a closed-source binaries only (just like Windows) Linux soloution for electronic filing. And I doubt seriously anyone is going to want to do the aforementioned federal hoop jumping (which includes background checks for some software authoring company employees and/or the company itself) and then give the program away for free.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Huh? Last time I checked France was a huge part of the EU and while it may seem bizarre to you and your 4 million countryment, I filed just as cryptic tax returns for them over the last 3 years. Guess what, they withhold for Social Security but not Income tax, meaning I wrote a bloody huge check four times every year to pay the tax man.
As far as "your way being better", I'd much rather have everyone write a check to the government every year, maybe that would finally spur the revolution we need. When you don't see it, except as a digit on a check, the tax seems reasonable. Let people write a check for 20% of their earnings and see how fast fiscal conservatives get elected.
While I'm at it, every time I'm in the US something I get really pissed off at is that shops are allowed to advertise a basic tax-exclusive price on goods. Here in the EU it's law that shops have to advertise a VAT-inclusive tax so that when you get to the counter you pay the advertised price, not the price plus 10-20% sales tax. How do you guys put up with that?
How do you put up with paying a 20% tax, in addition to confiscatory rates for social security, income, and property tax? Again, if it were buried in the price, I'm sure we'd gladly pay but since it's obvious, it helps keep government spending down.
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
A number of people have mentioned H&R block finding additional deductions they wouldn't have thought of on their own. Anyone care to be specific?
The reason I ask is that I've always done my own taxes, either by hand (way back when) or with TurboTax or TaxAct. My tax situtation isn't overly complicated but isn't overly simple either (mortgage, small business, investments, etc).
I've never felt like the tax code was too complicated for me to find deductions I was entitled to. All the tax programs ask you specific questions related to all areas where you might find deductions. I'm just wondering what are these elusive deductions that H&R block is able to find that couldn't be found with a little bit of homework.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Why the hell should we make the job of the IRS easier? Deluge them with good old fashion paper returns by snail mail. Helping them improve their efficiency only frees up their resoures to harass taxpayers. No thanks.
Fight the powers that be.
That is what I'll be doing this year but I hope to god that next year we can start something new and not have to worry about this any more.
I am all for replacing the current taxation setup with something better - however, I don't think that the "FairTax" is the right approach.
One of the things I remember from economics courses I took in college a few years back was that taxation tied to sales of goods and/or services is a regressive tax - that is, if the sales tax on a $12 item is $1 (which is approximately what it would be here in Los Angeles), the $1 is a bigger percentage of a poor person's income than it would be of a rich persons. This makes the tax burden higher for the poor than it is for the rich. That doesn't seem like a sound policy to me - even though the proponents of such a tax suggest a rebate to those at the poverty line or lower, what happens to those who are only slightly above the poverty line? The poverty line's accuracy is also determined by geography - $10k a year goes a lot farther in the midwest than it does in Southern California.
That's not to say that the other way around - which is in theory how we are currently operating, but not in actuality - isn't fair either. Having taxation tied to how much you make is a disincentive to making more (theoretically). Why should someone be penalized (through higher taxes) for making a good living? Isn't the idea of a capitalist system to make as much as you can?
Flat tax makes the most sense of income taxes - even though I still don't like it (I don't think income tax should exist at all). Oh yeah, and encourage reduction in spending at the federal level (ok...you can mod this as "Funny"). Governor Schwartzenegger's State of the State address had a lot of good points - let's hope he can take it beyond mere words.
You're asking the wrong question. Better questions are: Why do you have to file tax returns at all? Why is our tax system so complicated? Why does it cost so much to comply tax code and regulations?
Last year I spent hours crunching through my taxes using turbo tax. I tried really hard to get it all right, but in the end, I'm not honestly 100% sure that I did. Well I think the answer is here at fairtax.org. Basically it all comes down to 3 words "National Sales Tax". Then the linux software problem goes away
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If the IRS insists on making the tax code so complicated
Remember: it's not the IRS that makes the tax code, it's congress. The complications are so that little congresspeople can get some loophole that they want in there.
Yeah, the IRS can be a pain to deal with, but they have to deal with the convoluted laws passed down by our elected representatives.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
or having your Governor appoint your Senators (#17)
Actually, under the original Constitutional system, the Senators were appointed by the state legislatures. Art. I, Sect. 3, Clause 1.
This was also an extremely good idea. Congress was originally supposed to have two houses: one to represent the general populace of the United States, through directly elected representatives, and one to be a council of all the member states, through senators chosen by those states' governments.
The idea of the Senate was supposed to be that the various state governments could communicate their concerns and desires to the general council of states at the national capital. Their delegates would discuss these matters with the delegates of the other state governments. If the peoples' own representatives and the President concurred, a law could be passed.
Instead, with the Seventeenth Amendment, we now have the same House as before, but also a redundant second House where every state gets two more super-Representatives. The member states of the federal union have been cut completely out of that union's deliberations!
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I would love to see something like fairtax or a flat tax replace our current tax system, but I don't hold out much hope for it. From a political perspective, producing "tweaks" in the tax code is a great way for our representatives to pander to special interest groups. Plus, there are a lot of people for whom the current tax code is their bread & butter - the IRS, H&R Block and many independent accountants. Such a bill would face some serious opposition.
:-(
Even if such a broad, sweeping reform were made, I fully expect that by the next year, our politicians would introduce special exception cases to benefit politically powerful groups.
All of the components that make up what you purchase at the retail level are taxed before they are passed up the supply chain. The cost of that tax is passed along with them. The reason that companies are moving overseas is because our current tax system punishes companies for making money overseas and bringing them back to the US. If a US company makes money from their European division, it is taxed in Europe and then it is taxed again in the US. Almost every other country does not double tax corporate profits that way. We need a better tax system that does not punish companies and individuals for being successful. The fair tax replaces our current level of spending without hiding your taxes in the price of goods or through your withholding taxes from your paycheck. You will be able to determine how much tax you want to pay by limiting what you purchase.
As far as purchasing things overseas and bringing them back, they will still be taxed at the border. If you have ever lived overseas and moved back you are required to fill out custom forms from which you will be taxed.