957
Musk says he 'deleted' IRS easy filing team that let Americans file taxes for free online
(www.rawstory.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
957 points (99.1% liked)
News
24403 readers
4364 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In Denmark We've had easy tax filing on the Internet for more than a decade, and before that it was also extremely easy, as we got a form with all the usual data filled out, and we only had to send in if we had changes. I haven't done my taxes for 30 years!!!
Except when we bought a house we've had a few tax deductions on energy saving changes, which took 2 minutes to enter.
Every piece of standard information is collected automatically, like wages, bank info, stock profits, real estate taxes, and the rest if you have anything additional is super easy to fill out. The old paper tax return form is AFAIK completely abandoned since more than a decade ago.
USA under Trump with Elron Musk making it even worse is what we would call working like monkeys in a cage. If they really end this program, it makes it more difficult to do your taxes, AND cost tax payers MORE!!
Thanks, we know the rest of the modern world has it better in literally every way literally everywhere else. Can someone just like invade and save us please?
Unfortunately USA is extremely good at violence, probably the best in the world, so I guess you'll just have to fight it out amongst yourselves. But I wish all the best to all the reasonable Americans, that still believe in decency and democracy.
This is most accurate and depressing assessment of the United States I have ever read.
Being a child of the 60's in Europe, the first President I remember is Jimmy Carter. It is really disappointing that we have seen no other president of USA come even close to caliber of Jimmy Carter.
Nobody since can even "Nå ham til sokkerholderne." Sorry but I can't find a fitting translation, the literal translation is "reach his sock holders" the closest AFAIK is "head and shoulders above", but it doesn't really illustrate the huge distance between Jimmy Carter and every US president since.
Back then we dreamed of peace, tolerance and progress of society. Since then it's been all about money, and at the most scraping a few benefits for the worst off.
So when you say it's depressing, you are goddam right it's depressing. USA threw away their future, mostly to just benefit big oil and the 1%. But more than that, almost all of the developed world is following in the footsteps of USA!? So although it's not nearly as bad, we are going the wrong way too. 😥
Once they have control of all the people and property used to commit that violence... I mean, it's not going to stay within US borders, is it?
No probably not, I hope MAGA will be thrown out when the stupid people rooting for them realize what it really is.
But as things are going, it doesn't look good.
Sorry, you've spent 75 years arming your own government to the point of making this impossible. In the name of "security". Do you feel secure yet?
Imagine calling it a “Defense” budget and going to invade the Middle East, on the near opposite side of the world, twice in 3 years.
Even this easy file was ineligible for anyone who did any IRA which americans have to do to have retirment funds and is super common. Of course the idea was the thing was supposed to be expanded not sunk.
They're still developing it. This was a test rollout to see if they could do it. IRS software was still running on cobol mainframes. Upgrading from these things take time and a lot of development. And they're doing it from scratch.
I mean its sorta funny though because if someone does not put in their taxes the irs will send them a filled out one and ask for a signature to go forward. They also have this great form 1040x that would be perfect to send a prefilled tax return out and leave room for modifications.
This real only works for W2 workers, and a few 1099ers.
They know when you leave some things (banks, brokerages, employers) that also report to them off. They don't know everything.
So yes, they could prefill it a majority, but the filing companies didn't want that to happen
Sorry as a non American IDK what IRA is in this context, usually it's Irish Republican Army, but that doesn't fit the context. Obviously pension funds are automatic too here, I just forgot to mention those.
Individual Retirement Account
👍
sorry I thought mentioning it had to do with retirement would be enough. if you put money into a special account you can't touch till you retire then they will not tax it right away but only when you withdraw it once your retired. Alternatively you can pay the tax and put it into an account where they will not tax any investment growth of it or tax what you withdraw. Yeah I even feel stupid typing it out. I hope this helps anyone in a country with politicians trying to sell privatizing shit.
I prefer to know what an acronym stands for, before claiming I know what is meant, and looking up 3 letter acronyms for another country is not as easy as I suspect most Americans think it is.
But from your explanation I now figure the RA is retirement account, so now I only lack the meaning of the I? Which with my new knowledge I could look up, and find out means Individual.
So now I know in this context, IRA is Individual Retirement Account.
ah. I see. I thought you want meaning and did not realize it was more just the name thing.
Thanks, it was good enough to figure it out. 😀