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In fairness, I've received a few crazy notices from the IRS that didn't include the basis for an investment and just treated the MSRP of an asset as unalloyed income. Consequently, my wife nearly had a heart attack when she got a notice for $32k in taxes owed on a car we sold for $8k.
But also in fairness, this was because I misfiled. I amended the schedule C and updated the bluebook value of the vehicle, the purchase price, the sales price, and the net income. Ended up owing a few hundred bucks.
But if I hadn't had a decade of experience filing the arcane nuances of American tax filing, I could understand going into a panic.
My favorite IRS notices are the scary you owe us letters that always say somewhere in normal font "if you have already paid or started a payment plan you can disregard this notice." Sometimes you can get those letters months after paying. To be fair, my taxes are complicated, but boy do they really need Congress to give them money to modernize their systems.
I continually owed money to the tax department. Until they realised I didn't and they'd been aggressively taking money from my salary for the debt over past three years.
My last tax time was a $23K refund.
That’ll teach you. Deadbeats like you are a real drain on society. Don’t worry about Elon Musk and Donald Trump, they’re cool.
As someone with no experience with the US tax system, that sounds just as arcane as much of it SovCit nonsense.
I don't think the actual system being so complex helps matters much.
It sure doesn't, but Intuit needs exponential growth so here we are.
Some of this is just the reporting. If I buy a thing for $92k and sell it for $100k, but the IRS only sees "You got $100k from a sale", they're going to assume they should tax the full $100k rather than the difference between the buy and sell price. If I'm in the 32% tax bracket, that means 32% of the $100k sale rather than the $8k profit.
But I agree, there are definitely better methods of state-administered tax accounting that wouldn't eat up hours of my life every April.
Some of those are words I understand.