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starlithunter · 1 year

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PSA

If you are in the US and do your taxes, use the official IRS site for free filing!

Many companies will advertise free filing and then claim you have deductions or needs that require their paid solutions, and they will not tell you until the end of the process when you are exhausted and want it to be over. These ones are fully free and approved by the IRS!

Save yourself money and stress.

#psa #taxes #irs #turbotax sucks #blazing this as a public service because no one taught me to do taxes properly #learn from my mistakes

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the-final-sif · 1 year

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For anyone in the US who has just realized that they are nearly 1 month away from their taxes being due (April 18th) and is panicking because they don't know what to do,

Calm down.

If you're new to taxes, and in an early part of your life (just earning wages from a company that does withholdings), they're actually pretty easy to do and odds are you're just gonna get some free money (your tax refund).

Collect documents. Specifically, go get your get your W2, a form sent to you by whatever company you work for. Most will send you this online. Some might send you a paper copy.

https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free

Go to the above link, there's free filing options for federal taxes, and for some state taxes. It took me ~15 minutes to do my taxes in total, and then the government gave me like 1k back.

If your situation is more complicated than just having a W2, then go to the IRS's help page. They have a ton of super helpful tools that can walk you through different situations and what you need to do, they also have a toll-free help line.

https://www.irs.gov/help/ita

I know everyone talks about how much taxes suck, but legit, if you're an average wage earner and don't own a house or anything, odds are your taxes can be done in 15 minutes and then you get some of the taxes you paid back. It's not that scary, and the IRS has been working really hard to make the process as simple as possible.

Good luck!

#us taxes #irs #taxes #sif speaks #listen I realized that old people will have you convinced taxes are a mess #but honest to god people who are at a new spot in their life #are fine #it's very easy and then you get money

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satoshy12 · 7 months

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IRS Agent Danny

IRS agent Danny

The Joker looked at his goons and screamed, " Do it faster!"

Batman, who came through the window, said, " Stop Joker!"

Joker looked at his goons and said, " You all don't stop packing, Bats! I don't have time for you. I have to pay up; otherwise, I will go to jail for tax evasion!"

Batman;" What? "

Joker: " The IRS sent their new agent after me again! I own them for 36.000.000 dollars, and I don't pay; they will come with IRS levy permits!"

Danny walked into the place and said, " So Joker?"

Joker smiled a not crazy smile:" Here you have it. Not one penny less or more. Now Batman, you can put me in prison."

Batman wasn't sure what had happened as the Joker left into the police car.

Bruce looked at the young agent; he looked pretty young, between Jason and Tim's ages, wearing a fur-trimmed brown jacket, tactical military pants, and a knife holder. He seems to be looking at a list.

Danny, looking at his list, says, " So, I talked with Bane, Oswald Cobblepot, Harvey Dent, Red Hood, Roman Sionis, Victor Fries, Hugo Strange, Slade Wilson, and now the Joker, other then well as Pamela Isley, who is in prison for tax evasion for 2 years. They all paid. I think I am done with Gotham, so Metropolis is next."

And yes, Bane paid taxes on the money he earned from his drug empire.

Danny turned his face to Batman and said, "So, Mr. Batman, I heard your electric Batmobile is around $US1.5 million. So we should have a talk about your taxes."

Bruce had no idea what happened, but he didn't like what was about to happen.

It ended with Batman sitting next to the Joker in the police SUV.

The Joker looked at Batman, not sure what had happened.

"I want my phone call; I need to call Nightwing. I have to pay my Bat taxes."

Joker:" Hahahahaha! Smartly, you didn't try to run away. We all tried, but well, we'd rather fight you than him again."

In Arkham

Ivy is kind of a pariah, criminals don't like people who evade taxes. As the IRS send then their special agent. So it was her fault he was back in Gotham!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G56VgsLfKY4

Danny's clothes are like RE4 Leon's clothes

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liberalsarecool · 2 months

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$560 BILLION from the most advantaged people in the world. How dare we call all this tremendous organized theft a meritocracy.

You KNOW only the privileged cheat on their taxes at these large amounts.

The IRS is delivering fairness for the rest of us.

#taxation #irs

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godwhore · 2 months

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The IRS is piloting this new tool where you can file your taxes for free. If you’re in the following states:

Arizona

California

Florida

Massachusetts

Nevada

New Hampshire

New York

South Dakota

Tennessee

Texas

Washington state

Wyoming

You may be eligible. Let’s help them roll this out so we don’t need to rely on third party companies who just want to grab our money for something that should be free.

#IRS #taxes #direct file #tax season #finance #news

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Microsoft put their tax-evasion in writing and now they owe $29 billion

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

If there's one thing I took away from Propublica's explosive IRS Files, it's that "tax avoidance" (which is legal) isn't a separate phenomenon from "tax evasion" (which is not), but rather a thinly veiled euphemism for it:

https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

That realization sits behind my series of noir novels about the two-fisted forensic accountant Martin Hench, which started with last April's Red Team Blues and continues with The Bezzle, this coming February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

A typical noir hero is an unlicensed cop, who goes places the cops can't go and asks questions the cops can't ask. The noir part comes in at the end, when the hero is forced to admit that he's being going places the cops didn't want to go and asking questions the cops didn't want to ask. Marty Hench is a noir hero, but he's not an unlicensed cop, he's an unlicensed IRS inspector, and like other noir heroes, his capers are forever resulting in his realization that the questions and places the IRS won't investigate are down to their choice not to investigate, not an inability to investigate.

The IRS Files are a testimony to this proposition: that Leona Hemsley wasn't wrong when she said, "Taxes are for the little people." Helmsley's crime wasn't believing that proposition – it was stating it aloud, repeatedly, to the press. The tax-avoidance strategies revealed in the IRS Files are obviously tax evasion, and the IRS simply let it slide, focusing their auditing firepower on working people who couldn't afford to defend themselves, looking for things like minor compliance errors committed by people receiving public benefits.

Or at least, that's how it used to be. But the Biden administration poured billions into the IRS, greenlighting 30,000 new employees whose mission would be to investigate the kinds of 0.1%ers and giant multinational corporations who'd Helmsleyed their way into tax-free fortunes. The fact that these elite monsters paid no tax was hardly a secret, and the impunity with which they functioned was a constant, corrosive force that delegitimized American society as a place where the rules only applied to everyday people and not the rich and powerful who preyed on them.

The poster-child for the IRS's new anti-impunity campaign is Microsoft, who, decades ago, "sold its IP to to an 85-person factory it owned in a small Puerto Rican city," brokered a deal with the corporate friendly Puerto Rican government to pay almost no taxes, and channeled all its profits through the tiny facility:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

That was in 2005. Now, the IRS has come after Microsoft for all the taxes it evaded through the gambit, demanding that the company pay it $29 billion. What's more, the courts are taking the IRS's side in this case, consistently ruling against Microsoft as it seeks to keep its ill-gotten billions:

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-microsoft-audit-back-taxes-puerto-rico-billions

Now, no one expects that Microsoft is going to write a check to the IRS tomorrow. The company's made it clear that they intend to tie this up in the courts for a decade if they can, claiming, for example, that Trump's amnesty for corporate tax-cheats means the company doesn't have to give up a dime.

This gambit has worked for Microsoft before. After seven years in antitrust hell in the 1990s, the company was eventually convicted of violating the Sherman Act, America's bedrock competition law. But they kept the case in court until 2001, running out the clock until GW Bush was elected and let them go free. Bush had a very selective version of being "tough on crime."

But for all that Microsoft escaped being broken up, the seven years of depositions, investigations, subpoenas and negative publicity took a toll on the company. Bill Gates was personally humiliated when he became the star of the first viral video, as grainy VHS tapes of his disastrous and belligerent deposition spread far and wide:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1

If you really want to know who Bill Gates is beneath that sweater-vested savior persona, check out the antitrust deposition – it's still a banger, 25 years on:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/revisiting-the-spectacular-failure-that-was-the-bill-gates-deposition/

In cases like these, the process is the punishment: Microsoft's dirty laundry was aired far and wide, its swaggering founder was brought low, and the company's conduct changed for years afterwards. Gates once told Kara Swisher that Microsoft missed its chance to buy Android because they were "distracted by the antitrust trial." But the Android acquisition came four years after the antitrust case ended. What Gates meant was that four years after he wriggled off the DoJ's hook, he was still so wounded and gunshy that he lacked the nerve to risk the regulatory scrutiny that such an anticompetitive merger would entail.

What's more, other companies got the message too. Large companies watched what happened to Microsoft and traded their reckless disregard for antitrust law for a timid respect. The effect eventually wore off, but the Microsoft antitrust case created a brief window where real competition was possible without the constant threat of being crushed by lawless monopolists. Sometimes you have to execute an admiral to encourage the others.

A decade in IRS hell will be even more painful for Microsoft than the antitrust years were. For one thing, the Puerto Rico scam was mainly a product of ex-CEO Steve Ballmer, a man possessed of so little executive function that it's a supreme irony that he was ever a corporate executive. Ballmer is a refreshingly plain-spoken corporate criminal who is so florid in his blatant admissions of guilt and shouted torrents of self-incriminating abuse that the exhibits in the Microsoft-IRS cases to come are sure to be viral sensations beyond even the Gates deposition's high-water mark.

It's not just Ballmer, either. In theory, corporate crime should be hard to prosecute because it's so hard to prove criminal intent. But tech executives can't help telling on themselves, and are very prone indeed to putting all their nefarious plans in writing (think of the FTC conspirators who hung out in a group-chat called "Wirefraud"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Ballmer's colleagues at Microsoft were far from circumspect on the illegitimacy of the Puerto Rico gambit. One Microsoft executive gloated – in writing – that it was a "pure tax play." That is, it was untainted by any legitimate corporate purpose other than to create a nonsensical gambit that effectively relocated Microsoft's corporate headquarters to a tiny CD-pressing plant in the Caribbean.

But if other Microsoft execs were calling this a "pure tax play," one can only imagine what Ballmer called it. Ballmer, after all, is a serial tax-cheat, the star of multiple editions of the IRS Files. For example, there's the wheeze whereby he has turned his NBA team into a bottomless sinkhole for the taxes on his vast fortune:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

Or his "tax-loss harvesting" – a ploy whereby rich people do a "wash trade," buying and selling the same asset at the same time, not so much circumventing the IRS rules against this as violating those rules while expecting the IRS to turn a blind eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

Ballmer needs all those scams. After all, he was one of the pandemic's most successful profiteers. He was one of eight billionaires who added at least a billion more to his net worth during lockdown:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-bonanza-2020/

Like all forms of rot, corruption spreads. Microsoft turned Washington State into a corporate tax-haven and starved the state of funds, paving the way for other tax-cheats like Amazon to establish themselves in the area. But the same anti-corruption movement that revitalized the IRS has also taken root in Washington, where reformers instituted a new capital gains tax aimed at the ultra-wealthy that has funded a renaissance in infrastructure and social spending:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

If the IRS does manage to drag Microsoft through the courts for the next decade, it's going to do more than air the company's dirty laundry. It'll expose more of Ballmer's habitual sleaze, and the ways that Microsoft dragged a whole state into a pit of austerity. And even more importantly, it'll expose the Puertopia conspiracy, a neocolonial project that transformed Puerto Rico into an onshore-offshore tax-haven that saw the island strip-mined and then placed under corporate management:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#que-viva-albizu

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#micros-tilde-one

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #irs #puerto rico #puertopia #microsoft #micros~1 #tax avoidance #tax evasion #pure tax play #big tech can't stop telling on itself #corporate crime #rough ride #the procedure is the punishment #steve ballmer #pour encouragez les autres

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phoenixyfriend · 3 months

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Unrelated but I mentioned that bullshit law about defunding the IRS that's going around to a coworker and he paused and very carefully asked "is that... a bad thing?" Because unfortunately he is aware of my recent addiction to politics casts and sees the look on my face.

Anyway.

If the IRS loses funding, they only have the manpower to audit poor people (simple, straightforward taxes), and the people with more complicated taxes from things like investment portfolios and offshore accounts get off with tax evasion because the IRS doesn't have the time or money to go after them.

The IRS is already auditing YOU. Giving them more money for more employees gives them the ability to audit people like Trump and Bezos.

Give the IRS more money, it's better for all of us (except billionaires).

#current events #IRS #politics

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joehills · 3 months

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The EFTPS quarterly tax payment system got a login overhaul and no one warned me.

I tried to log in to EFTPS last night to pay my quarterly taxes and was surprised that they've revamped their authentication flow.

They now have three options for Multi-Factor Authentication, and I had to pick one and set that up before I could even get to the page to enter my EFTPS credentials.

The first option they have, PIV/CAC is only for federal employees, so that's not helpful to me.

The next two options for everyone else are login.gov and id.me.

I looked at both options and login.gov seemed easier to set up quickly (and they’re not a private company that collects biometric data), so I’m gonna recommend them.

If you like processes, I took notes on my steps:

1. Visit https://www.eftps.gov/eftps/

2. Click the “MAKE A PAYMENT” button

3. Wait for a new page to load with three login options

4. Click the “LOGIN.GOV” button

5. Wait for the Login.Gov|Treasury page to load

6. Click “create an account”

7. Enter your e-mail address

8. Select English

9. Accept the Rules of Use

10. Click Submit

11. Check your e-mail for a confirmation link

12. Load the URL from the confirmation link

13. Enter a secure password

14. Set up MFA with your preferred methods (app-dependent and out of scope for these instructions)

15. At this point, if you were quick enough, it might take you straight to the EFTPS traditional login page, which still requires your old EFTPS enrollment credentials. If not, head back to the EFTPS page and click MAKE A PAYMENT and use your login.gov credentials and MFA now.

I would strongly recommend setting that all up now, and not waiting until January 16th, as this will be the first tax deadline this system was in place for and we have no idea how well the servers can handle the load.

Until next time, y'all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee.

Keep quarterly estimating!

#eftps #irs #quarterly estimated tax

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siphersaysstuff · 1 month

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As we head into tax time, I just want to make sure everyone knows

ANYONE CONTACTING YOU VIA PHONE ABOUT UNPAID TAXES ARE SCAMMERS

IF THERE IS A GENUINE TAX PROBLEM, THE IRS WILL CONTACT YOU VIA CERTIFIED LETTER THROUGH THE MAIL, AND ONLY VIA CERTIFIED LETTER THROUGH THE MAIL

signed, a person who's gone through Tax Issues with the IRS in the past

#taxes #irs #scam warning #phone scam

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mitchipedia · 1 year

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Cory Doctorow: “If you were unfortunate enough to e-file your US tax using HR Block, Taxact or Taxslayer, your most sensitive financial information was nonconsenually shared with Facebook, where it was added to the involuntary dossier the company maintains billions of people, including people who don't have Facebook accounts.”

#Pluralistic #Cory Doctorow #IRS #taxes #HR Block #Taxact #Taxslayer #Facebook #privacy #monopoly #politics #US politics #Grover Norquist #income tax #US income tax

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porterdavis · 6 months

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BREAKING: The IRS says Microsoft owes $29 BILLION in back taxes.

The announcement comes as the IRS has begun a historic effort to crack down on wealthy and corporate tax cheats.

This is what happens when you properly fund the IRS.

- Americans for Tax Fairness

#irs #tax cheats

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saywhat-politics · 7 months

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The IRS is launching an effort to crack down on 1,600 millionaires and 75 large business partnerships that owe hundreds of millions of dollars in past due taxes

WASHINGTON -- The IRS announced on Friday it is launching an effort to aggressively pursue 1,600 millionaires and 75 large business partnerships that owe hundreds of millions of dollars in past due taxes.

IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel said that with a boost in federal funding and the help of artificial intelligence tools, the agency has new means of targeting wealthy people who have “cut corners" on their taxes.

“If you pay your taxes on time it should be particularly frustrating when you see that wealthy filers are not,” Werfel told reporters in a call previewing the announcement. He said 1,600 millionaires who owe at least $250,000 each in back taxes and 75 large business partnerships that have assets of roughly $10 billion on average are targeted for the new “compliance efforts."

Werfel said a massive hiring effort and AI research tools developed by IRS employees and contractors are playing a big role in identifying wealthy tax dodgers. The agency is making an effort to showcase positive results from its burst of new funding under President Joe Biden's Democratic administration as Republicans in Congress look to claw back some of that money.

“New tools are helping us see patterns and trends that we could not see before, and as a result, we have higher confidence on where to look and find where large partnerships are shielding income," he said.

#irs

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liberalsarecool · 3 months

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