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CA State Offers To Prepare Simple Tax Returns
Makarand writes "California is ready to roll out a program for taxpayers where the
state will
offer to fill out their tax forms for them if they are simple enough. Taxpayers
will merely have to go online, download and review the completed forms prepared
for them and confirm their return. This program is supposed to save money
for the state, reduce tax related headaches for many and bring into the
tax system those who are not paying any taxes currently.
The state will take information it already receives on W-2 wage statements,
put it in the right boxes on the tax return, and do the math."
New Zealand has been doing this for several years now - the only difference being that we don't get to look over the completed forms, which I have always been a bit leery about. But if you get to see what they have done, I think that this is a Good Thing.
The tax code is simple enough in New Zealand that most people simply go with what IRD asseses, and that's usually right.
The only reason it's not national is
Sorry, unless the next thing you said was "politics," then you are wrong.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Link
It's mostly due to our referendum system where any nutjob with a few dollars can collect signatures and get his idea placed on the ballot. That's where property tax caps, no healthcare for illegals, medical marijuana, definition of marriage, stem cell bonds, etc... all came from.
It's simple, and it's vastly biased in favor of the rich.
The poorer people will be spending 100% of their income (or close to it), while the more wealthy you are, the more you will save, which means you spend vastly less.
Hell, they PROMOTE this fact, saying taxing consumption is better than income, because those with no income will still have to make purchases.
It's always good to have a tax system that is extremely biased towards the rich, makes it harder on people who save their money (basically doubles the burden of inflation), and charges people just as much when they are making plenty of money, as it does when they are out of work and can't afford extra taxes.
What a stupid tax system.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
In Japan, if you're employed with a salary under 20 million yen (~$180k) and you don't have any other significant income--which covers a pretty large fraction of taxpayers--you don't even have to send in a tax return in the first place; your employer does it for you and you see the result on your December or January paycheck (we call it nenmatsu-chousei, end-of-year adjustment).
Good or bad? I dunno, but it's sure less of a pain than writing up a 1040 every year that says I don't owe the IRS any money because I earned it all abroad.
In sweden I have been doing tax returns via internet since 2003 or 2004. You just log in on the swedish IRS webpage, using the national internet-id system "bankID" (its platform indepedent). When you are logged in you find a bunch of html forms (income, profit on capital, etc) prefilled with numbers, just as the ordinary tax return. You also see how much return on tax you get or if you must pay more tax.
If everything is ok, you just click "send in", if you think something is wrong, you just change the numbers, give a motivation, and then click "send in". Just like with the normal declaration.
Also one can do the tax return via SMS; if everything looks good, you can SMS a code to a certain number, and voila, done. However, this sms-tax-return does not allow for altering of the declaration. But most people does not need to anyway.
There is also lots of other stuff to do on the swedish IRS webpage using BankID, such as checking the "tax-account" (its like a bank account, but on this only tax gets in and out) to see if the return of tax has come yet. Normally amounts above 100 SEK is automatically transferred to ones normal bank account (this is also configured via the webb).
It works really good. "E-government", as it is called here, is a good idea.
Pay attention--the rebate check to cover spending up to the poverty level addresses this. Sheesh. Read something.
I don't mean to be offensive, its just that people who bash the fairtax are seeming to fall into two categories:
1. those who have heard something bad, and are parroting what they've heard
2. those who don't understand it because they only read part of it.
It takes very little to understand that the FairTax plan is robust--it handles things like poverty line spending, and those who live at the higher end of the curve. Don't you think that these "obvious flaws" are obvious enough to those of us who support the plan to be seen and addressed?
When someone comes to me with a detailed analysis and then says, "Hey, I've run the numbers, and it doesn't work", then I'll sit up and pay attention. IN the meantime, let us all work on making the FairTax a reality.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)