Residents of 12 states are eligible to participate if they meet certain criteria. But the agency’s plans have already met resistance from tax preparation companies.

  • Auzy@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    Here in Australia, you can literally file your tax now for free in a few clicks using the government website. If you wait a few weeks, everything for most people is prefilled except deductions

    It’s absolutely awesome

    • frog 🐸@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      10 months ago

      Pretty much the same in the UK. Most people don’t have to file their tax at all (it’s automatically deducted from wages for most people), but for those that do, you can do it for free on the government’s website, which is largely a matter of saying how much you earned, and any relevant deductions. The government then calculates what tax you have to pay. If your tax affairs are more complicated than that, you’re earning enough that you’re in the “having an accountant is mandatory” territory anyway.

        • frog 🐸@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          10 months ago

          Yeah, it’s not flawless, but it’s straightforward to use, which really is the thing you need for this kind of service, since it’s intended to be used by normal people rather than experts. The one and only thing that our glorious Conservative overlords have done well in the last 13 years is modernising a lot of official administrative processes like this so they can be done digitally and without a load of needless complexity.