The problem is that if you owe taxes (which I have every year but one, even when I’ve only had wages), there’s no way to pay when filing electronically without incurring a fee.
Discussion: Congress Is About To Ban The IRS From Offering A Free Tax Filing Service. Thank TurboTax
When was that? I went to school in the 90s and never heard of it as an issue. I have no idea what the waived tuition amount even was, since no one ever mentioned it.
Honestly, don’t worry about that kind of thing. If you make a mistake and they notice, they send you a letter and tell you to pay up. If they don’t, then you were right whatever you did. They’re not going to send you to jail over $3 in unpaid taxes.
For a couple of years I was working abroad. Since you have to include foreign-earned income under wages and then deduct it up to a certain limit (around $90,000), that requires converting the foreign salary into US$. I accidentally used different exchange rates in different places on my return, so they told me I owed a few extra dollars. But it turns out there’s no real guidance on what exchange rate to use, even though that matters a lot more - you can use any reasonable rate you want and potentially save quite a bit!
Employers send W-2s to the Social Security Administration, not the IRS. I think the IRS uses their Commodore 64 to link to SSA’s Apple IIc to get the information. Or, they just use the W-2 you send them. Or, they are so understaffed that no human eyes ever sees any of the information and it is all on the honor system.
The Social Security Administration uses the three credit bureaus for access to your SSA account. To set up an account, you have to know the answers to multiple-choice questions posed by their system from information they got from the credit bureaus. The problem is often times the credit bureaus’ information is crap and very hard to get corrected. Healthcare.gov uses them, too. Buy something and have it sent to your office on a credit card that is billed to your house and the bureaus will change your home address to your office (or worse).
But, you’re right. It doesn’t have to be this hard. And the information is somewhere on a government computer. Most employers file on a quarterly basis the gross pay of each employee by name and SSN (the rest at least annually). So, the feds don’t have to wait to get the newest information. But their computers are ancient and there is no incentive to promote the public good.
1980s. It was resolved either when I was in school or shortly thereafter; can’t remember whether it was a law or a ruling.
The subject came up again with the big GOP tax bill, which counted grad school tuition waivers as taxable income. This would have been devastating for higher education in the US on a number of fronts. The GOP did back down, thank god.
I always adjust my withholding to where I don’t have to write a check at the end of the year, so I am no expert on that part of it.
I’m going back to the paper world either way. My eyes have aged out to where it’s really hard shifting visual focus from a sheet of paper to a screen and back.
And while we wait for Democrats to develop perfection, do you suggest we vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson?
I’ve voted for imperfect Democrats since my first election and plan on doing so until a perfect one drops from the skies. But sorry for my mild criticism. Forgot it was not allowed.
Criticism is perfectly fine as long as you don’t try to convince others to wait for perfection falling from the sky, because the stuff falling from the sky usually does not smell as perfection.
We live in a real world and if your read the news you would know that even the most progressive freshmen in the Democratic caucus voted for the bill after making a calculation that, given good things that other parts of the bill do, this bill is better than no bill .
When you qualify for free filing with one of these tax preparation companies, you can pay electronically. There is also at least one company which has tax preparation and filing (including electronic payment of tax due) completely free. It’s a for profit company so it’s customers need to make a decision about potential non-monetary costs.
I have some investments that pay dividends and a consulting business on weekends in addition to my 40hr/wk job, so I never know how much extra income I’ll have.
I have zero normal income (right now) and am living on withdrawals from my IRA. It is easy for me to set withholding to 15% which gives me a $500 to 2 K refund (depending on how much I have to withdraw that year and which bracket I end up in. Similar to CA income tax where withholding of 5% seems to do the trick.