this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Is it really that hard to do your own taxes? I was taught to do this in school and it's really not hard if all you have to do is write in how much money you made and then claim the standard deduction. If your taxes really are that messy then you can hire an accountant to do it, and they'll do it ten times better than any tax software could, because if the software could do it better then they'd bloody use the software.
Edit: was mostly referring to people who work a job and that's it, which is probably 80% of the population
Have a high yield savings account? Have an investment account? A house with a mortgage? Finding somebody that has none of those is much more rare than somebody who has one of those.
And now you've got: Your standard 1040. Your W-2. Schedule A to deduct the house mortgage, property taxes, etc. Schedule B to report your interest and dividends. Schedule D for capital gains and losses (which still frequently come up even if you didn't make any transactions all year). 1099-INT from your savings account. 1099-DIV from your investment account.
And that's just the super super common stuff that tens of millions of Americans are filling out each year. There's still more and more byzantine steps for other common cases that aren't quite as common as the ones I've listed above. Have split custody of a child? You're going to be reading and reading through multiple pages of instructions to determine 1) if you can claim them as a dependent 2) if you can claim them for the child tax credit 3) if you can claim them for EITC.
And that's not even getting into the number of places where the instructions are basically to fill out long sections of forms two different ways and then only use one of the two based on the final number. All the work and effort for the other one just gets thrown away. But they can't just tell you which way to do it up front because there's no way to know until you get that final number both ways.