[pat64]

It’s tangential at best but there is a better way than all of this nonsense.

Your employer can declare and direct tax owed from your paycheck directly each month. Come end of year you can click like 3 links in a tax portal to ensure you’ve not overpaid and that’s the extent of your tax worries.

We obviously don’t have a perfect system here in Ireland (far from it) but Jesus Christ America, your tax system is absolutely insane to Europeans.

[dugmartin]

We have required payroll deductions here in the US for federal, state and (sometimes) city taxes and if you are self-employed we have required quarterly estimated tax payments. Federal deductions include Social Security tax, Medicare tax, and income tax and employers send this money directly to the federal government. State and city deductions are usually just income tax (here is Massachusetts we also pay a tax for paid family leave).

The insane part in the US is that then every year we have to fill out a bunch of forms filling in information the government already knows. For many people this should instead be as you said "click like 3 links".

It gets really complicated when you have investment or partnership income, sell stocks or property, etc. I still do my own (complicated) taxes every year but it gets more and more complex every year and takes more and more time.

[snvzz]

It's called PAYE (for Pay As You Earn), and standard in most of the world, just not the US.

[dangus]

Technically it is the standard in the US as well. That’s what income tax withholding is for, and most people’s mortgages or rents bundle in property taxes as well. Then the other chunk of taxes that most people pay are sales tax and gas taxes, all paid as you earn/spend.

The real distinction is the backwards filing process. You have to fill out information on W2s and 1099s that the government already has.

I think this could be streamlined without pissing off the third party tax filing industry. Just make it so that all of the information on those forms can be provided all at once to the tax filing software companies when a person puts in their personal info. TurboTax already kind of sort of does this when you put in a couple of pieces of info from each W2 and it fetches the rest, but it could be streamlined into a standard.

Then for people who file manually, there could be a system where the government sends a consolidated group of summed values for use on the manual forms. I feel like this could be an acceptable compromise that works within our broken lobbying system.