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The point is that the IRS basically already knows about your money, so why make things so complicated and force people to do their taxes themselves every year? Why not properly fund the institution primarily responsible for america's spending money and just have them send you a list of what they're pretty sure your taxes are for you to look over and confirm. Like a civilized country.
> The point is that the IRS basically already knows about your money, so why make things so complicated and force people to do their taxes themselves every year? Why not properly fund the institution primarily responsible for america's spending money and just have them send you a list of what they're pretty sure your taxes are for you to look over and confirm. Like a civilized country.
The problem is that while they might know what money we made, they don't know the deductions. Last year you were single. This year you have a non-working spouse and a kid.
Last year you had W2 income. This year you have dividends, a sole proprietorship and a mortgage, etc. etc.
I have friends and family in other countries where either these things don't affect your taxes or don't exist, and they get a booklet that says "*here's what we know about your income/taxes, this is what you owe or what we owe you, if this is correct, SMS 'Yes' to 12345*".
Done.
I'd love to have a system like that here too.
About 90% of Americans use the standard deduction. These people could get a post card with their tax on it. If they agree, you sign it and send it in. Done.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-standard-deduction#:~:text=As%20a%20result%2C%20TCJA%20substantially,about%2070%20percent%20in%202017.
I hate to break it to you, champ, but they ***do*** know all of that. Why do you think they give themselves a chance to accept or reject your return? Because they're verifying what you sent them against their own records.
They know some of that, but not everything tax-relevant is automatically reported to the IRS. They don't know about your gifts to charity (especially if they were made in cash). They don't know about your deductible job-related expenses.
They don't know anything about an expense that might be deductible or might not be depending on the context.
Tax code is fucked I'm not defending it. But this isn't true.
There's a lot of little exceptions that add up to big differences.
Some deductions are temporary, or limited and elective. For example, at some point I qualified for an education credit for any 4 years or something like that. I went part time so my undergrad took 6. They wouldn't have a way to figure out when I was claiming that, or perhaps that I'd chosen another deduction instead.
Not to mention how much of a shit show it becomes with pass through entities.
There's a lot of shit that doesn't ever show up in any records they can directly access.
There's a hundred better ways to solve these problems, don't get me wrong. But it has to work this way until it changes more systemically.
Biden administration making moves!!
After limited trial, U.S. is rolling out free tax return software.
https://apnews.com/article/treasury-income-taxes-irs-audits-direct-file-04c3b4b55ca0d37b2c40697a392c78aa#lxtkfao5bccsr9aynnf
And what's crazier is that doing away with filing altogether has been a largely bipartisan point. Reagan pitched the return-free filing system back in 1985 and that's after several calls for check-the-box systems during the 1970s.
> We envision a system where more than half of us would not even have to fill out a return. We call it the return-free system, and it would be totally voluntary. If you decided to participate, you would automatically receive your refund or a letter explaining any additional tax you owe. Should you disagree with this figure, you would be free to fill out your taxes using the regular form. We believe most Americans would go from the long form or the short form to no form.
— President Reagan (May 1985)
There was even Obama's "Simple Return" and Trump's postcard tax form. But the point is that the tax preparation industry has lobbied hard to prevent any of this from largely happening.
The fact that we got direct file last year is amazing. It shows that the industry's grasp is not as airtight as they had thought. The goal has always been to get us to Reagan's return-free system, it's just been a long forty year road to get where we are at.
They spread FUD about the government seeing what you're spending your money on. Basically that if you let the IRS automate it they'll see your unclaimed tips and side hustle money. All the temporarily embarrassed millionaires cry foul and it goes nowhere so that the really fucking rich people continue wealth consolidation.
I seem to recall they had a deal with the fed. The fed gave TurboTax a few years before rolling out the "free tax return" bid and in exchange, TurboTax (and others) would give low-income earners free returns.
That tax filers were smited (fine or something) for pressuring all filers to pay for returns and that was the last I heard of it
And I believe if their business can't survive any form of competition then it wasn't a very good business (there are exceptions to this of course when we're looking at some of the shitty business practices of companies like Walmart, Amazon, and steaming services that take a loss to undercut smaller competitors because they can and the smaller companies can't to drive them out of business).
Not to mention this is misinformation. For example, CA spent the money on homelessness but didn't always track the outcomes. That's completely different than not tracking the money at all. the others are probably similar.
That's just a bandaid. We've already had multiple free versions of federal tax filing but people don't use it because they're familiar with TurboTax. Intuit sends you a ton of notifications around tax time, and they make it sound like using any other software would be hard since they already have your previous years filings to autofill.
They need to revamp the tax filing system so that TurboTax or HR Block aren't needed at all for the average worker just filing a normal W2. Just send me a statement at the end of the year and some simple software to double check its accurate.
>red tape and regulations.
Bribery of elected officials and lobbying more like it.
Good thing this Biden admin is making IRS is test out their own native tax prep software.
[You could vote for the current administration has created a free filing program that a rival administration would likely end](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2172)
Do you consider "red tape and regulations" to be bad things?
You realize that inconvenience and lack of efficiency are the greatest protections we have against tyranny?
Dictatorships are so easy and direct. The leader needs something -- he takes it. The leader does not like something you do or say -- he has you killed. The leader has a plan -- he makes you do it for him. The leader wants to fight a war and needs troops -- he conscripts you.
Strangely enough, the slowness and inefficiency of democracy turns out to be a feature, not a bug. Red tape and regulations may annoy you, but they are even more annoying for wealthy and powerful people who want to herd us like cattle.
It’s not red tape and regulations, it’s businesses lobbying the government so they wont provide us value. Other countries with more “regulations” have systems the gov provides to do 99% of your taxes for you.
Switched to that instead of turbo tax, it was the same if not a better experience. I will be back next year.
Also Intuit lobbies to keep taxes difficult which makes me not want to use them anymore for anything ever again.
I'm a CPA and I have filed through them for the last 8 years. I only kept doing them instead of the trial filing on the IRS website for my state because I was lazy this year.
This doesnt show that, the only people affected by the $600 Venmo rule are people with business accounts on Venmo. The IRS cannot calculate a small business owners taxes ahead of time.
Was money sent to Ukraine? I thought it was all sent to US weapons contractors that sent weapons to Ukraine?
California has only been reported to not keeping track of if the money helped as much as they hoped.
source:
California has failed to adequately monitor the outcomes of its vast spending on homelessness programs, according to a state audit released Tuesday, raising questions about whether billions of dollars meant to thwart the crisis has been worth it as the number of people living unsheltered has soared.
Pentagon spending: please provide a source.
The US treasury has been prosecuting people that spent PPP money incorrectly.
California spent 24 billion dollars, in 2023, on 181,000 homeless. That comes to, approximately, 132,596 per homeless person.
For half of that you could feed, cloth, and house every single homeless person in California, if you set up the right system to do it.
Heck, you could probably do it for less.
Edit: totally misread a stat, my bad. That 24 billion was spent between 2018 and 2023. Which comes to 4 billion a year. The homeless population in california was estimated to be 181,000 in 2023 (it was estimated to be 161,548 in 2018.)
If we assumed it was 181k, the whole period, that would come out to approximately $22,099, per person, per year.
I still think that should be enough to house everyone and I still wonder how and where that money is spent.
O you could still funnel a fortune to your buddies, ya got to have contracts to provide the food. Build the housing, environmental reviews on the impact to native species of ground squirrel on removing unhoused people from the streets.
One of the biggest arguments i will make for a UBI as a replacment for the traditional welfare state is on a per individual recipient basis it can eliminate huge swaths of administrative burden and there would be significant less oppertunity for graft.
> California spent 24 billion dollars, in 2023
24 billion over the last 5 years, not "2023". Even the links the OP is posting around this thread to "prove their point" say this.
> For half of that you could feed, cloth, and house every single homeless person in California, if you set up the right system to do it.
so, with the right system and multiplying the spending by ~2.5, we can do this.
OP is letting "with the right system" carry so much water in that statement. I could feed all of America's hungry for $600 a month if I could just find a vendor to sell me the food *for the right price*.
California is investing in a lot of ways to fight homelessness because their are disputes about what the best way is. And so yes, it is not a good thing that they *failed to track outcomes* well enough to compare the end results, but they do know where the money went. They just failed follow up and track people's ongoing results well enough to determine what the *right system* is.
These numbers are misleading. I didn't understand them either and someone pointed me to better information. First, that $24bn is not just from 2023. Second, a portion of California's homeless funding is spent on keeping families that are at risk of becoming homeless housed.
Granted, there is still a lot of corruption in the way the money is spent. Several providers in SF are under scrutiny for misuse of funds and many others are in the process of of being audited. It's nowhere near $132k/person though.
>$22,099
>that should be enough to house everyone
You're looking at a *bare minimum* of $1600/mo for a 625 sqft 1 bed 1 bath apartment outside of LA (with no pets). That's $19,200/year right there. Also doesn't include utilities. It only goes up from there. Shit, you aren't going to get anything over 600 sqft in fucking Watts for less than $2k/mo.
The state should not be paying for “rent” in a Los Angeles apartment. The state should use its $20k/p to build large facilities that provide a room and toilet along with communal facilities.
Being homeless should not mean you get a $2000/month apartment for free. You get to live in a government facility with strings attached. Rehab, job training, education courses, etc.
These people need help that goes beyond just money. They need structure and a purpose to get them assimilated back into society.
But idiots in this state call that unfair and inhumane. As if living in a tent and shitting on the street is so much better.
So you’d like to build new units, provide rehab, drug testing, job training, education courses, and my guess is cleaners (communal toilets after all) and staffing of the buildings. Maybe mental health counselors and security too.
For $20k a year? Maybe in 1995.
> I still think that should be enough to house everyone and I still wonder how and where that money is spent.
You think $1,841 a month is enough to house a homeless person in California?
Who in their right mind is leasing property to a homeless person for that much? There is almost a 100% chance that the homeless person is going to trash your place.
The majority of homeless people are experiencing short term homelessness. So a lot of those people do find homes, but then other people fall into homelessness.
Well it turns out you have to feed and clothe them too. As well as provide what they really need, which is mental and other healthcare. Which can’t be addressed until you’ve satisfied the shelter and food needs. 22k isn’t enough. No one can live on that.
Precisely... This is one of those ridiculous right-wing talking points for susceptible dummies... Establishing structural solutions to problems costs more than solving the problem individually, but... Unless you are an asshole who loves being spoonfed bullshit, you understand that the solution is much more permanent when it addresses the structural problems.
All I know it’s much cheaper than jailing them or interning them in psych wards. No one wants to solve the homeless crisis. It’s very expensive and good people just get pissed the fuck off when people are doing better when they think they deserve better
>If we assumed it was 181k, the whole period, that would come out to approximately $22,099, per person, per year.
>I still think that should be enough to house everyone and I still wonder how and where that money is spent.
Then you clearly don't understand what housing costs in CA cities, which is where the vast majority of said homeless population reside. This is a reasonable number, even aside from the fact that you're not accounting for all kinds of different administrative and personnel costs.
You completed flubbed the math on this, but somehow still didn't change your opinion at all when confronted with evidence. Funny how that works.
I don’t have a clue what CA did, but if they built programs or housing that will last for many years, that may not be a problem at all. Either way, they should be able to account for what was done.
I came here for comments like this thank you. These are just inflammatory statements made with little basis in fact. Words getting twisted and meanings slightly changed to make things sound worse than they really are.
2.3 trillion from the Pentagon is true but isn’t as interesting as you’d think. It basically boils down to there is no unified set of records for expenditures in the Department of Defense, so all these records are spread of 100s of file types, softwares, paper records, micro-films etc. and when they did a full audit they were unable to account for 2.4 trillion over, I believe 50 years. So it’s a lot more of we don’t have a receipt from 50 years ago or the tape that file was stored on is corroded, than the money was stolen.
Obviously this lack of unified record keeping is perfect for corruption and graft but the vast majority of the 2.4 trillion is probably a combination of poor record keeping, data degradation, and the auditors being unable to find many records scattered in various locations and formats.
> 2.3 trillion from the Pentagon is true but isn’t as interesting as you’d think. It basically boils down to there is no unified set of records for expenditures in the Department of Defense and these records are spread of 100s of file types, paper records, micro-film etc. and when they did a full audit they were unable to account for 2.4 trillion over, I believe 50 years. So it’s a lot more of we don’t have a receipt from 50 years ago or the tape that file was stored on is corroded than stolen.
Not to mention, the DoD is literally the largest organization on the planet. Nothing is larger in any metric.
They have failed every audit because they have to account for everything thing, down to the toenail clippers they issue recruits and every single bullet. It's probably in the tens/hundreds/thousands of trillions of objects (I can't comprehend how many things they have, tbh) they have to account for in their audits. Which amazes me that each audit has a higher % each time regardless of the insurmountable task. Especially when things like "float" tests exist in the navy (and similar practices in other branches), where they throw old shit in the ocean to test if it floats to know in an "emergency" situation. Shit gets thrown away all the time without records being filed.
Money yes, but mostly arms, ammunition, and explosives with a value of N dollars. It’s a good deal because everything has a shelf life. Propellants become unreliable, explosives degrade, etc. we donate that and then buy ourselves new.
The US has mostly been sending the military equivalent of pocket lint to Ukraine and they've been doing a lot with it. $800 billion a year goes to the military and most of that stuff will never be used. Turing a portion of this into an investment that maintains America's position as the world's top superpower is one that is worth making, in my opinion.
If the US must spend that much money on bigger and fancier weaponry, we might as well get some use out of it
> Was money sent to Ukraine? I thought it was all sent to US weapons contractors that sent weapons to Ukraine?
Funds were sent directly to help pay their soldiers and what not. It was a small fraction of the funds sent.
People don't remember that the US and Ukraine signed a treaty/Money more than a decade ago that states: in exchange for Ukraine giving up its' *nuclear armaments*, the US agrees to defend and assist Ukraine of it were ever attacked by another *nuclear powerhouse*, like Russia.
These things are always bullshit.
The Pentagon didn't lose $2.3 trillion. They didn't just *not* track $2.3 tillion. They failed audits because, for example, things were logged in two accounting systems when it should have been logged in one, and it makes reconciliation harder.
On all of these they are trying to apply much higher standards than what they claim IRS is then applying to you or me.
The Pentagon knows *how* much money it spent, when people say that they "can't track $XXX in spending" what they really mean is that they can't always prove to a gnat's ass under full accounting principles that certain spending is fully authorized.
This can happen for a host of reasons, from as simple as that a personnel clerk didn't file a memorandum signed by a commanding officer all the way to being unable to prove that money paid to an Afghan tribe for building a well actually resulted in *that* well.
But what it *doesn't* capture is stuff like "Fat Leonard"-style graft, which probably *did* have the requisite paperwork "proving" that the money was spent on maritime husbanding services (at an inflated price, but hey at least it's on paper!).
Now think of your own personal spending... what kind of proof do you need to claim a child tax credit? The IRS lets you claim the standard deduction with no proof whatsoever, no itemizing receipts or anything, but the Pentagon can't pay a sailor a $250 family separation allowance for a single month without retaining paperwork for years... and God forbid the ship's clerk who signed the form "by direction of the Commanding Officer" didn't *also* send along the "by direction" letter letting the clerk use the CO's letterhead, that would be an audit violation....
How much the US has sent Ukraine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/biden-ukraine-military-aid-us/
https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine
Shhhh, there seems to be a theme here of shitting on the government today with incredibly ignorant takes (thought diarrhea, to fit the motif). Reality might hurt them.
There are no finance education posts here. Half are moron level attacks at federal gov by foreign actors, the other middle school level critiques of current system by what i suspect are actual middle schoolers
Your heart doesn't go out to [all those people rotting in jail](https://i.imgur.com/ZO9NRWs.png) for not reporting transfers of $601 on their tax returns?
Well, the $6.2b was not an inability to track, but am accounting error that overvalued old equipment that was sent. [https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagons-ukraine-accounting-error-revised-up-62-billion-2023-06-20/](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagons-ukraine-accounting-error-revised-up-62-billion-2023-06-20/)
Fuck putin. I say we blockade russian ports with the royal navy. Start drone striking them 24/7. They cant even handle ukranian cesnas. They would collapse in a month.
We destabilized one of our biggest geopolitical enemies without losing a single US life and all it cost us was donating outdated military equipment. I would take that deal any day of the week
I'm mad that they aren't going after the people we know, via Panama papers, have consistently evaded taxes. Maybe lighten up on people who they might get another hundred bucks out of and go after the big kahunas
They forgot to add in this scenario that they got 600 dollars every week from that "friend" and are mad that they actually have to pay on their income.
Posts like this are always a great sign that someone doesn't know a single thing about anything. Money goes "missing" because government is complicated and systems are outdated. Just because they can't track it doesn't mean it was wasted or spent on secret projects or some shit. The IRS also does not give two fucks if you sent $600 to your friend, they have no way of knowing if you did, and they're sure as fuck not sending you to jail for it. If they somehow found out, and it was taxable, they'd just work with you to pay those taxes. The whole point of the IRS is to generate tax revenue, not fucking spend money by sending people to jail.
There actually is a very small portion of the IRS that are badge / gun carrying criminal investigators that DO send people to prison, but those “people” are drug lords and money launderers that are moving millions of dollars.
Also, to your first point, all accounting transactions use the monetary unit principle so everything is stated in “dollars” which is not the same thing as “cash”.
The IRS is all about taxes. Gov't spending doesn't create any tax debt for the IRS to find in an audit. Gov't spending is for services not for revenue generation. The hope is that the services that are provided will result in citizens providing greater tax revenue in the future.
That's what the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) does.
It is a Legislative Office and three (or more) nominees are selected by special commission that is formed by:
* The US Speaker of the House of Representatives
* The President pro tempore of the United States Senate
* The majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate
* The Chair and Ranking Member of the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
* The Chair and Ranking Member of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
The person selected by the President is then referred to the Senate's Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. And must pass a vote there before being recommend to the full Senate for vote to become the Comptroller General of the United States. A term for the Comptroller is fifteen years. The United States is on our 8th Comptroller.
The Comptroller General reports to Congress and serves at the pleasure of the President. All investigations by the Comptroller come at the request of Congress and/or Committees or subcommittees within. It's up to Congress to enforce any action given by the Comptroller onto the Government at large. That said, since 1996 since consolidated reporting began, no Comptroller has agreed to the veracity of the Federal Budget and have called upon Congress to hold various departments (especially the DoD) to higher standards for transparency and book keeping.
There's been marginal progress on the various aspects Congress has sent the GAO after, but it's up to Congress to stop getting into finger pointing matches and actually do the things to hold the US more accountable.
The Pentagon is easy: they lose money that is spent on black ops/projects so they don’t have breadcrumbs to highlight what they might be. You know, after they have had their contractors pad their non classified projects to the maximum dollar value believable.
Someone there knows where every penny went. They just aren’t telling us and playing stupid.
> The Pentagon is easy: they lose money that is spent on black ops/projects so they don’t have breadcrumbs to highlight what they might be. You know, after they have had their contractors pad their non classified projects to the maximum dollar value believable. Like full stop, the top secret budgets are absolutely accounted for and some members of congress have security clearance to review the granular budget for them.
Has nothing to do with it. Black budgets are accounted for. Nothing is lost.
What explains why the DoD fails audits is the amount of shit they actually have to keep track of. It's LITERALLY the largest organization on the planet. By every single metric. Amount of people, budget, inventory, square feet, etc. Imagine having to audit the largest organization on the planet, that has had a terrible record system for a long time. Now imagine what makes it worse is members of the military throwing shit away without documenting it. This has accumulated a a black hole in terms of actually being able to keep track of stuff. Despite this, the audit the DoD has been increasing the percentage of stuff accounted for with every audit.
Respectfully, if I routinely lose important paperwork, and I have a history of having really shitty record systems, that usually indicates “okay, stop, fix the system.” - Not “Well, just keep doing what’s not working.” - Why doesn’t that apply to large government entities? A failed audit for me is a “drop everything and fix it” problem, why not for them?
There was no federal requirement for them to audit it until in the 2000s. They weren't doing DoD wide audits. Each branch would do audits for themselves, document stuff their own way, etc.
They literally ARE doing what you suggest?!?! Imagine that, they are trying to fix the issues with the audits and every audit they do it comes closer to accounting for all of their inventory/budget/etc.
The problem is the 50 years proceeding it not requiring audits. So a lot of shit has been lost track of.
It *was* fixed, two decades ago. Firstly, the "missing" Pentagon money was never missing in the first place, every single cent was accounted for across many disparate internal accounting systems, some of which didn't have adequate audit trails.
Secondly, the government then spent three years unifying and modernising the DoD's internal accounting systems and by 2004, the figure had dropped from $2.3tn to a few hundred million. In 2019 the Pentagon again confirmed that its external audit "did not identify instances where DoD does not know where obligated dollars are being spent."
I know the first point is deceptive, but point taken. They never lost track of the money in Ukraine. The military revised the estimated value of the equipment sent, it wasn’t money. Then Russian trolls and USful idiots went apeshit per usual.
This post is misleading.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said a detailed review of the accounting error found that **the military services used replacement costs rather than the book value of equipment that was pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine. She said final calculations show there was an error of $3.6 billion in the current fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended last Sept. 30.**
In California, they know how the money was spent, but they didn't track the homeless population.
There is so much right wing bullshit on this forum.
OP posts article links, but doesn't read them.
In reality, they may have actually kept track of where it went, but are unable to disclose the information. It simplifies things a lot just to say "don't know where it went"
This is referring to a rule that third party payment processors have to send out 1099k's for business accounts who have transactions over $600. This rule doesnt actually change what is taxable just puts more responsibility on Venmo for reporting. It also doesnt affect Venmo users who dont have business accounts.
No-one who buys this has worked in a large organization.
Low level procedural errors stack up very quickly into sums that embarrass leadership.
Then you add organizational chaos that can change all sorts of variables, cancelled projects, structural changes, system changes, etc.
The fact that you put an accounting error in Ukraine’s favor first yet completely skipped over the massive PPP fraud of 2020 means you’re probably getting your ‘facts’ from a bad source. Over $200 billion dollars given to already rich Americans was spent fraudulently and you’re worried about the fact that our government over valued previous aid to Ukraine by $6.2 billion? It’s not even money, it’s overvalued equipment and as with the majority of aid to Ukraine, more aid just means more money spent in America to create more equipment. What exactly do you hate about $6.2 billion more spent on manufacturing jobs?
Track doesn't necessarily mean missing. Most of the time it's because they didn't follow proper protocol because the controls weren't implemented fast enough. Not even talking about system updates/upgrades/movement.
I really, really hate these insane figures that are "unable to track", because it's literally not what happened, those trillions of dollars represent the entire budget of the entire DOD for years. You know any army privates who didn't get paid for years?
What actually happened is that it's difficult to audit. So, Accounting 101:
Every single transaction has many, many follow on transactions. Like take a cheeseburger - you buy it for $1, and McDonalds gets $1. That's the first one. But McDonalds puts it in the store account for new receipts, then the next day that $1 gets split into the operational account, payroll, and franchise fees. Keep it simple and assume those are all $.33.
The franchise fees go to McDonalds corporate, generating another transaction (and its own set of follow on transactions that I don't know enough about corporate accounting to speak to).
The payroll gets split across 11 employee accounts, who each get $.03. Then those are split into SS withholding, actual pay, and insurance at $.01 each.
The operating account, lets say $.10 of that goes to real estate, $.10 to supplies, and $.13 to utilities.
That one cheeseburger has generated dozens of transactions, and a failure to reconcile one account to another (like that missing penny at the beginning, do to a rounding error) will show dozens or hundreds of dollars of transactions that don't match. That happens when you've got separate accounting systems with different rules that span decades - they don't talk to each other easily or at all. It's not about missing money, it's transactions that don't match up and require an accountant to do the legwork, which gets real tough real fast.
Of course, businesses don't actually split each individual transaction like that, but they will do it in aggregate. Just pretend the cheeseburger you bought was the sum total of sales for the day, and you're on the right track.
The answer is incredibly simple: they absolutely do not have all of your data. They have one data point, the income that was reported to them by your employer, assuming you are a W2 employee. They know literally nothing else. The IRS does not know if you are married, had a kid, bought a house, sold a house, paid property tax, paid mortgage interest, paid student loan interest, paid out of pocket healthcare costs, made investment income, had a side job, inherited money, etc. You file your taxes because they have no way of knowing any of that until you tell them.
You have to commit pretty serious tax fraud to have any chance of going to jail.
And.. we dont let the IRS audit the government. Id bet if we did, theyd find that shit. Theyre really, really fuckin good at their jobs.
They audited me a few years ago because I qualified for $40 in EITC. After a year of calling, waiting on hold for 90 minutes (it automatically hangs up after that long, “courtesy disconnect”), and *faxing* documents they approved my refund and paid $60 in interest. I also got a 1099-INT to pay taxes on that interest.
This is a direct result of not funding the IRS. When they only have the resources to do an inch-deep audit, that means all their auditors have a whole lot of poors to work through.
That 80 billion dollars to fund the IRS was already having great results from the wealthy - which is probably why Republicans immediately clawed most of that funding back.
The humanitarian causes are measured in billions. The corporate causes are measured in trillions. Weird. It's almost like all those "welfare queens" the right imagines aren't the ones draining all the country's resources.
Tax returns for the common man is simple, anything other than that needs a bit more knowledge, but just like any job, you can learn how to do it. Government spending is ridiculous and the business class is the reason why. Soon as a government contract is created the .50 cent gum packs turn into 45 dollars. And the government just says okay. The shit is stupid.
No shit, I paid my MA state taxes on time, just got a bill friday for another 186 dollars, and they had the balls to charge me interest. Meanwhile the just signed a billion dollar deal to take care of all the illegals flooding here.Thats not hyperbole. Great.
Funding for the IRS directly correlates to catching more billionaire tax fraud, at a rate where the tax system makes back far more money than is spent.
It is because the IRS is weak, that they can only target the middle and lower classes. As it stands, they cannot stand up to the billionaire class’s armies of tax lawyers.
Gift Tax only kicks in after $18,000 to a single person ($10,000 to two people for $20,000 total would be fine) in a single year with some exceptions around gifting assets instead of cash. Anyone in a position to gift that much money can afford a few hours with a financial advisor to get everything sorted out.
I'm not a conspiracy nut, but that DoD annouced that they couldn't accound for 2.3 trillion 9/10/2001. Next day and no one talks about it because of the attacks. Seems way to convienent
Many of these claims are nonsense. Esspecislly the 6.2 billion ukraine one. 40 million of their own money was found to stolen from corrupt officials. 1 billion in foreign aid was poorly tracked and were not certain where every exact weapon has went. Both of those things are very different than the claim here.
Well the bottom is correct unless neither of you report in any method that the transaction was made but then you get into laws about how much of monetary value can you gift without reporting it in your state. Right now as long as you stay below 17k USD it is not required. The problem is no one ever knows it exists until they get a letter in the mail that they are charged with not reporting income.
Typically it’s a matter of cost. It’s really expensive to track money. That’s a major reason why government projects are so expensive. Especially defense spending. It costs a dollar to track a dollar
Behold a bad faith argument that totally misrepresents the basic facts of each point and conflates different ideas and presents them as the same type of scenario.
In reality, the IRS is severely underfunded. Which in turn means that the U.S. Treasury is underfunded because it can’t enforce its laws against major tax cheats. Which hurts everyone else.
And even against major tax cheats, what it wants is the money. So it’ll give you chance after chance after chance to pay what you owe before criminal charges are even thought of.
But don’t let me interrupt libertarian anti-government agitprop with reality. Like the reality that most nations would kill to have agencies as effective as the White House, Pentagon, and Treasury.
Not that it matters much, but you would not have to report sending someone over $600. Different than earnings or lottery winnings. Also, even if you exceeded the reportable threshold on a gift you're nowhere close to the taxable amount on gifts.. But still
That last one is not at all how that works. If you sent $601.57 to your friend to do an actual job, asked him for a W-9 or his SSN and address, and filed form 1099 with the IRS to report the contract payment, they would know and would correct his taxes if he failed to include it. But there's not exact mechanism I know of by which they would automatically pursue anything if you didn't. They just started requiring reporting from CashApp etc as they do banks. If you failed to file a 1099 and they caught you, there's a fine per missing 1099 but it's not high. A lot of small business owners mess that up. I feel like learning about tax filing and proper books retroactively is a right of passage for first year business owners. Ultimately it's on the friend to pay their taxes whether they get a 1099 or not.
I get irony, but, technically, they are two different topics. It is implied that IRS know you have received 600 hence it can track the income, but it can't, it merely automated the chase for reporting which is also what other deparments are doing.
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Ironically, all this shows is that the tax prep industry is an extortion racket for 95% of taxpayers.
An artificial industry that only exists because of red tape and regulations. Like soooo many other industries in the USA.
Regulations? Try bribery. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free
More like extortion since we are threatened with jail if we don’t pay
And sometimes doing taxes is a "best guess" LOL
The point is that the IRS basically already knows about your money, so why make things so complicated and force people to do their taxes themselves every year? Why not properly fund the institution primarily responsible for america's spending money and just have them send you a list of what they're pretty sure your taxes are for you to look over and confirm. Like a civilized country.
> The point is that the IRS basically already knows about your money, so why make things so complicated and force people to do their taxes themselves every year? Why not properly fund the institution primarily responsible for america's spending money and just have them send you a list of what they're pretty sure your taxes are for you to look over and confirm. Like a civilized country. The problem is that while they might know what money we made, they don't know the deductions. Last year you were single. This year you have a non-working spouse and a kid. Last year you had W2 income. This year you have dividends, a sole proprietorship and a mortgage, etc. etc. I have friends and family in other countries where either these things don't affect your taxes or don't exist, and they get a booklet that says "*here's what we know about your income/taxes, this is what you owe or what we owe you, if this is correct, SMS 'Yes' to 12345*". Done. I'd love to have a system like that here too.
About 90% of Americans use the standard deduction. These people could get a post card with their tax on it. If they agree, you sign it and send it in. Done. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-standard-deduction#:~:text=As%20a%20result%2C%20TCJA%20substantially,about%2070%20percent%20in%202017.
THEY KNOW ALL OF THAT Like it or not, believe it or not. They have all that info.
I hate to break it to you, champ, but they ***do*** know all of that. Why do you think they give themselves a chance to accept or reject your return? Because they're verifying what you sent them against their own records.
They know some of that, but not everything tax-relevant is automatically reported to the IRS. They don't know about your gifts to charity (especially if they were made in cash). They don't know about your deductible job-related expenses. They don't know anything about an expense that might be deductible or might not be depending on the context.
Tax code is fucked I'm not defending it. But this isn't true. There's a lot of little exceptions that add up to big differences. Some deductions are temporary, or limited and elective. For example, at some point I qualified for an education credit for any 4 years or something like that. I went part time so my undergrad took 6. They wouldn't have a way to figure out when I was claiming that, or perhaps that I'd chosen another deduction instead. Not to mention how much of a shit show it becomes with pass through entities. There's a lot of shit that doesn't ever show up in any records they can directly access. There's a hundred better ways to solve these problems, don't get me wrong. But it has to work this way until it changes more systemically.
Biden administration making moves!! After limited trial, U.S. is rolling out free tax return software. https://apnews.com/article/treasury-income-taxes-irs-audits-direct-file-04c3b4b55ca0d37b2c40697a392c78aa#lxtkfao5bccsr9aynnf
That’s if TurboTax doesn’t nuke the god damn government. I remember they made a huge fussy crying bitch fit over that
Yup, had to do the trial because all of the lobbyists said it wouldn’t be popular… Turns out they were wrong, whoda thunk?
And what's crazier is that doing away with filing altogether has been a largely bipartisan point. Reagan pitched the return-free filing system back in 1985 and that's after several calls for check-the-box systems during the 1970s. > We envision a system where more than half of us would not even have to fill out a return. We call it the return-free system, and it would be totally voluntary. If you decided to participate, you would automatically receive your refund or a letter explaining any additional tax you owe. Should you disagree with this figure, you would be free to fill out your taxes using the regular form. We believe most Americans would go from the long form or the short form to no form. — President Reagan (May 1985) There was even Obama's "Simple Return" and Trump's postcard tax form. But the point is that the tax preparation industry has lobbied hard to prevent any of this from largely happening. The fact that we got direct file last year is amazing. It shows that the industry's grasp is not as airtight as they had thought. The goal has always been to get us to Reagan's return-free system, it's just been a long forty year road to get where we are at.
They spread FUD about the government seeing what you're spending your money on. Basically that if you let the IRS automate it they'll see your unclaimed tips and side hustle money. All the temporarily embarrassed millionaires cry foul and it goes nowhere so that the really fucking rich people continue wealth consolidation.
Unpopular opinion: I'm fine with people being forced to pay taxes on the money they've been under-reporting.
If a lobbyist says it's not a good idea it almost certainly is
I seem to recall they had a deal with the fed. The fed gave TurboTax a few years before rolling out the "free tax return" bid and in exchange, TurboTax (and others) would give low-income earners free returns. That tax filers were smited (fine or something) for pressuring all filers to pay for returns and that was the last I heard of it
And I believe if their business can't survive any form of competition then it wasn't a very good business (there are exceptions to this of course when we're looking at some of the shitty business practices of companies like Walmart, Amazon, and steaming services that take a loss to undercut smaller competitors because they can and the smaller companies can't to drive them out of business).
What are they going to do that doesn’t violate every antitrust law in existence?
Not to mention this is misinformation. For example, CA spent the money on homelessness but didn't always track the outcomes. That's completely different than not tracking the money at all. the others are probably similar.
That's just a bandaid. We've already had multiple free versions of federal tax filing but people don't use it because they're familiar with TurboTax. Intuit sends you a ton of notifications around tax time, and they make it sound like using any other software would be hard since they already have your previous years filings to autofill. They need to revamp the tax filing system so that TurboTax or HR Block aren't needed at all for the average worker just filing a normal W2. Just send me a statement at the end of the year and some simple software to double check its accurate.
>red tape and regulations. Bribery of elected officials and lobbying more like it. Good thing this Biden admin is making IRS is test out their own native tax prep software.
Unnecessary industries ready for deletion.
I remember Trump and Ryan were going to simplify taxes to the degree you could do it on a postcard. What happened?
> red tape and regulations. Nah, just lobbying. Inuit, to be specific, lobbying to prevent IRS from making taxes easier.
[You could vote for the current administration has created a free filing program that a rival administration would likely end](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2172)
Not regulations legal bribery known as lobbying.
The industry exists quite literally due to a lack of regulations around tax filings…
Do you consider "red tape and regulations" to be bad things? You realize that inconvenience and lack of efficiency are the greatest protections we have against tyranny? Dictatorships are so easy and direct. The leader needs something -- he takes it. The leader does not like something you do or say -- he has you killed. The leader has a plan -- he makes you do it for him. The leader wants to fight a war and needs troops -- he conscripts you. Strangely enough, the slowness and inefficiency of democracy turns out to be a feature, not a bug. Red tape and regulations may annoy you, but they are even more annoying for wealthy and powerful people who want to herd us like cattle.
Regulations are good. Every timeline republicans deregulate a sector or whatever we get shit like 2008
It’s not red tape and regulations, it’s businesses lobbying the government so they wont provide us value. Other countries with more “regulations” have systems the gov provides to do 99% of your taxes for you.
Hijacking to plug. Freetaxusa.com Just caught up on 3 years of taxes for free.
Switched to that instead of turbo tax, it was the same if not a better experience. I will be back next year. Also Intuit lobbies to keep taxes difficult which makes me not want to use them anymore for anything ever again.
Freetaxusa.com is dope. I used TurboTax for about a decade. Switched like 5 years ago. Would never look back.
I'm a CPA and I have filed through them for the last 8 years. I only kept doing them instead of the trial filing on the IRS website for my state because I was lazy this year.
This doesnt show that, the only people affected by the $600 Venmo rule are people with business accounts on Venmo. The IRS cannot calculate a small business owners taxes ahead of time.
Right? This is such a disingenuous post
Tell that to the millions of restaurant workers that get audited for not claiming $10k in cash tips a year. Fuck you and the IRS.
As a tax specialist…I can 100% confirm this is the case.
[удалено]
Agreed. We need to abolish the IRS altogether and go to a single national sales tax. This way everyone pays based on what they consume.
Was money sent to Ukraine? I thought it was all sent to US weapons contractors that sent weapons to Ukraine? California has only been reported to not keeping track of if the money helped as much as they hoped. source: California has failed to adequately monitor the outcomes of its vast spending on homelessness programs, according to a state audit released Tuesday, raising questions about whether billions of dollars meant to thwart the crisis has been worth it as the number of people living unsheltered has soared. Pentagon spending: please provide a source. The US treasury has been prosecuting people that spent PPP money incorrectly.
California spent 24 billion dollars, in 2023, on 181,000 homeless. That comes to, approximately, 132,596 per homeless person. For half of that you could feed, cloth, and house every single homeless person in California, if you set up the right system to do it. Heck, you could probably do it for less. Edit: totally misread a stat, my bad. That 24 billion was spent between 2018 and 2023. Which comes to 4 billion a year. The homeless population in california was estimated to be 181,000 in 2023 (it was estimated to be 161,548 in 2018.) If we assumed it was 181k, the whole period, that would come out to approximately $22,099, per person, per year. I still think that should be enough to house everyone and I still wonder how and where that money is spent.
That doesn’t account for the costs of means testing, setting up an overblown admin, and funneling some cash to your buddies.
O you could still funnel a fortune to your buddies, ya got to have contracts to provide the food. Build the housing, environmental reviews on the impact to native species of ground squirrel on removing unhoused people from the streets. One of the biggest arguments i will make for a UBI as a replacment for the traditional welfare state is on a per individual recipient basis it can eliminate huge swaths of administrative burden and there would be significant less oppertunity for graft.
Ironically the need to track every cent is a big reason for cost inflation
> California spent 24 billion dollars, in 2023 24 billion over the last 5 years, not "2023". Even the links the OP is posting around this thread to "prove their point" say this. > For half of that you could feed, cloth, and house every single homeless person in California, if you set up the right system to do it. so, with the right system and multiplying the spending by ~2.5, we can do this.
OP is letting "with the right system" carry so much water in that statement. I could feed all of America's hungry for $600 a month if I could just find a vendor to sell me the food *for the right price*. California is investing in a lot of ways to fight homelessness because their are disputes about what the best way is. And so yes, it is not a good thing that they *failed to track outcomes* well enough to compare the end results, but they do know where the money went. They just failed follow up and track people's ongoing results well enough to determine what the *right system* is.
These numbers are misleading. I didn't understand them either and someone pointed me to better information. First, that $24bn is not just from 2023. Second, a portion of California's homeless funding is spent on keeping families that are at risk of becoming homeless housed. Granted, there is still a lot of corruption in the way the money is spent. Several providers in SF are under scrutiny for misuse of funds and many others are in the process of of being audited. It's nowhere near $132k/person though.
>$22,099 >that should be enough to house everyone You're looking at a *bare minimum* of $1600/mo for a 625 sqft 1 bed 1 bath apartment outside of LA (with no pets). That's $19,200/year right there. Also doesn't include utilities. It only goes up from there. Shit, you aren't going to get anything over 600 sqft in fucking Watts for less than $2k/mo.
The state should not be paying for “rent” in a Los Angeles apartment. The state should use its $20k/p to build large facilities that provide a room and toilet along with communal facilities. Being homeless should not mean you get a $2000/month apartment for free. You get to live in a government facility with strings attached. Rehab, job training, education courses, etc. These people need help that goes beyond just money. They need structure and a purpose to get them assimilated back into society. But idiots in this state call that unfair and inhumane. As if living in a tent and shitting on the street is so much better.
So you’d like to build new units, provide rehab, drug testing, job training, education courses, and my guess is cleaners (communal toilets after all) and staffing of the buildings. Maybe mental health counselors and security too. For $20k a year? Maybe in 1995.
> I still think that should be enough to house everyone and I still wonder how and where that money is spent. You think $1,841 a month is enough to house a homeless person in California? Who in their right mind is leasing property to a homeless person for that much? There is almost a 100% chance that the homeless person is going to trash your place.
Stop spreading misinformation. Several others have shown your mistake, edit this or you’re a fraud.
The majority of homeless people are experiencing short term homelessness. So a lot of those people do find homes, but then other people fall into homelessness.
Well it turns out you have to feed and clothe them too. As well as provide what they really need, which is mental and other healthcare. Which can’t be addressed until you’ve satisfied the shelter and food needs. 22k isn’t enough. No one can live on that.
Precisely... This is one of those ridiculous right-wing talking points for susceptible dummies... Establishing structural solutions to problems costs more than solving the problem individually, but... Unless you are an asshole who loves being spoonfed bullshit, you understand that the solution is much more permanent when it addresses the structural problems.
It’s not that simple. It’s setting up infrastructure to help future and prevent future homelessness. It’s both cheap to start programs.
All I know it’s much cheaper than jailing them or interning them in psych wards. No one wants to solve the homeless crisis. It’s very expensive and good people just get pissed the fuck off when people are doing better when they think they deserve better
>If we assumed it was 181k, the whole period, that would come out to approximately $22,099, per person, per year. >I still think that should be enough to house everyone and I still wonder how and where that money is spent. Then you clearly don't understand what housing costs in CA cities, which is where the vast majority of said homeless population reside. This is a reasonable number, even aside from the fact that you're not accounting for all kinds of different administrative and personnel costs. You completed flubbed the math on this, but somehow still didn't change your opinion at all when confronted with evidence. Funny how that works.
I don’t have a clue what CA did, but if they built programs or housing that will last for many years, that may not be a problem at all. Either way, they should be able to account for what was done.
I came here for comments like this thank you. These are just inflammatory statements made with little basis in fact. Words getting twisted and meanings slightly changed to make things sound worse than they really are.
Feelings don't give a fuq about your facts! /s
2.3 trillion from the Pentagon is true but isn’t as interesting as you’d think. It basically boils down to there is no unified set of records for expenditures in the Department of Defense, so all these records are spread of 100s of file types, softwares, paper records, micro-films etc. and when they did a full audit they were unable to account for 2.4 trillion over, I believe 50 years. So it’s a lot more of we don’t have a receipt from 50 years ago or the tape that file was stored on is corroded, than the money was stolen. Obviously this lack of unified record keeping is perfect for corruption and graft but the vast majority of the 2.4 trillion is probably a combination of poor record keeping, data degradation, and the auditors being unable to find many records scattered in various locations and formats.
> 2.3 trillion from the Pentagon is true but isn’t as interesting as you’d think. It basically boils down to there is no unified set of records for expenditures in the Department of Defense and these records are spread of 100s of file types, paper records, micro-film etc. and when they did a full audit they were unable to account for 2.4 trillion over, I believe 50 years. So it’s a lot more of we don’t have a receipt from 50 years ago or the tape that file was stored on is corroded than stolen. Not to mention, the DoD is literally the largest organization on the planet. Nothing is larger in any metric. They have failed every audit because they have to account for everything thing, down to the toenail clippers they issue recruits and every single bullet. It's probably in the tens/hundreds/thousands of trillions of objects (I can't comprehend how many things they have, tbh) they have to account for in their audits. Which amazes me that each audit has a higher % each time regardless of the insurmountable task. Especially when things like "float" tests exist in the navy (and similar practices in other branches), where they throw old shit in the ocean to test if it floats to know in an "emergency" situation. Shit gets thrown away all the time without records being filed.
Money yes, but mostly arms, ammunition, and explosives with a value of N dollars. It’s a good deal because everything has a shelf life. Propellants become unreliable, explosives degrade, etc. we donate that and then buy ourselves new.
The US has mostly been sending the military equivalent of pocket lint to Ukraine and they've been doing a lot with it. $800 billion a year goes to the military and most of that stuff will never be used. Turing a portion of this into an investment that maintains America's position as the world's top superpower is one that is worth making, in my opinion. If the US must spend that much money on bigger and fancier weaponry, we might as well get some use out of it
It costs way more to recycle old weapons and munitions than to outsource the recycling to Ukraine.
Bonus benefit of weakening our adversaries in the process. Allows us to focus on the other.
> Was money sent to Ukraine? I thought it was all sent to US weapons contractors that sent weapons to Ukraine? Funds were sent directly to help pay their soldiers and what not. It was a small fraction of the funds sent.
People don't remember that the US and Ukraine signed a treaty/Money more than a decade ago that states: in exchange for Ukraine giving up its' *nuclear armaments*, the US agrees to defend and assist Ukraine of it were ever attacked by another *nuclear powerhouse*, like Russia.
Also, literally no one has ever been prosecuted for sending $600 to a friend. That’s not even something you have to report.
These things are always bullshit. The Pentagon didn't lose $2.3 trillion. They didn't just *not* track $2.3 tillion. They failed audits because, for example, things were logged in two accounting systems when it should have been logged in one, and it makes reconciliation harder.
>The US treasury has been prosecuting people that spent PPP money incorrectly. Be interesting to see how they prosecute most of congress.
On all of these they are trying to apply much higher standards than what they claim IRS is then applying to you or me. The Pentagon knows *how* much money it spent, when people say that they "can't track $XXX in spending" what they really mean is that they can't always prove to a gnat's ass under full accounting principles that certain spending is fully authorized. This can happen for a host of reasons, from as simple as that a personnel clerk didn't file a memorandum signed by a commanding officer all the way to being unable to prove that money paid to an Afghan tribe for building a well actually resulted in *that* well. But what it *doesn't* capture is stuff like "Fat Leonard"-style graft, which probably *did* have the requisite paperwork "proving" that the money was spent on maritime husbanding services (at an inflated price, but hey at least it's on paper!). Now think of your own personal spending... what kind of proof do you need to claim a child tax credit? The IRS lets you claim the standard deduction with no proof whatsoever, no itemizing receipts or anything, but the Pentagon can't pay a sailor a $250 family separation allowance for a single month without retaining paperwork for years... and God forbid the ship's clerk who signed the form "by direction of the Commanding Officer" didn't *also* send along the "by direction" letter letting the clerk use the CO's letterhead, that would be an audit violation....
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2023-11-15/pentagon-failed-audit-shutdown-funding-12064619.html
https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine 34 billion in cash to Ukraine, 70 billion in weapons.
How much the US has sent Ukraine https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/biden-ukraine-military-aid-us/ https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine
Yeah, this pic was made to shock and incite, not infirm via accuracy.
Shhhh, there seems to be a theme here of shitting on the government today with incredibly ignorant takes (thought diarrhea, to fit the motif). Reality might hurt them.
Is this to debate finance, or just claim victim status?
There are no finance education posts here. Half are moron level attacks at federal gov by foreign actors, the other middle school level critiques of current system by what i suspect are actual middle schoolers
Reddit is mostly 13 year olds of every age.
I am not sure it is educational, but the stated purpose is to debate. I frequently argue with people who would barely qualify as half a moron.
It's to fabricate a narrative with a bunch of statements that are somewhere between ridiculously misleading and outright lies.
And some how tagged as educational
Lately people are posting politics disguised as finance post. No sources or context. Just a lot of “Tax Bad”. Voodoo economics man.
"Taxes bad" gets upvoted to +1000 here, what do you expect. Its a cesspool of borderline anarcho capitalists constructing strawmans like this one.
Your heart doesn't go out to [all those people rotting in jail](https://i.imgur.com/ZO9NRWs.png) for not reporting transfers of $601 on their tax returns?
Right next to posts on why healthcare is so expensive, while paying less tax then all the other civilized nations.
There’s also a healthy mix of morons, teenage kids, and people who just have bad intentions.
Mostly the second, I'm sure.
I love the random figures without any sources straight out of Notepad. Doesn’t stop the monkeys at the circus from flinging shit around here.
Reddit: we’re unable to track any of OP’s sources
Well, the $6.2b was not an inability to track, but am accounting error that overvalued old equipment that was sent. [https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagons-ukraine-accounting-error-revised-up-62-billion-2023-06-20/](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pentagons-ukraine-accounting-error-revised-up-62-billion-2023-06-20/)
Fuck Putin. Send more weapons to Ukraine.
Based Putin and his dictatorial ambitions can burn
Fuck putin. I say we blockade russian ports with the royal navy. Start drone striking them 24/7. They cant even handle ukranian cesnas. They would collapse in a month.
We destabilized one of our biggest geopolitical enemies without losing a single US life and all it cost us was donating outdated military equipment. I would take that deal any day of the week
None of those are true. Just another embarrassing Facebook meme
I’m so mad that the government is catching tax evaders! 😤
I'm mad that they aren't going after the people we know, via Panama papers, have consistently evaded taxes. Maybe lighten up on people who they might get another hundred bucks out of and go after the big kahunas
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/20/biden-tax-plan-calls-for-crackdown-on-wealthy-who-hide-bulk-of-income.html That’s literally what they’re doing.
Unfortunately, it was significantly curtailed within the last year after Republicans held bills hostage until the IRS funding got scaled back.
They forgot to add in this scenario that they got 600 dollars every week from that "friend" and are mad that they actually have to pay on their income.
Posts like this are always a great sign that someone doesn't know a single thing about anything. Money goes "missing" because government is complicated and systems are outdated. Just because they can't track it doesn't mean it was wasted or spent on secret projects or some shit. The IRS also does not give two fucks if you sent $600 to your friend, they have no way of knowing if you did, and they're sure as fuck not sending you to jail for it. If they somehow found out, and it was taxable, they'd just work with you to pay those taxes. The whole point of the IRS is to generate tax revenue, not fucking spend money by sending people to jail.
There actually is a very small portion of the IRS that are badge / gun carrying criminal investigators that DO send people to prison, but those “people” are drug lords and money launderers that are moving millions of dollars. Also, to your first point, all accounting transactions use the monetary unit principle so everything is stated in “dollars” which is not the same thing as “cash”.
WOW an educated person in the wild! I didn't think they existed anymore.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking too highly of me. Broken clock, twice a day, etc.
Facts man we’re all idiots. Some people are just stupider.
RIGHT!!! Why doesn’t the IRS audit the freaking government, it sure needs to!
You mean like this? https://preview.redd.it/u9tkqeg1ll8d1.jpeg?width=470&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c1de86d20ec8b08615c3423db9c7f06bed72cbce
🤣
*How to fuck myself?*
Loooooool
The IRS is all about taxes. Gov't spending doesn't create any tax debt for the IRS to find in an audit. Gov't spending is for services not for revenue generation. The hope is that the services that are provided will result in citizens providing greater tax revenue in the future.
That's what the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) does. It is a Legislative Office and three (or more) nominees are selected by special commission that is formed by: * The US Speaker of the House of Representatives * The President pro tempore of the United States Senate * The majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate * The Chair and Ranking Member of the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs * The Chair and Ranking Member of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability The person selected by the President is then referred to the Senate's Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. And must pass a vote there before being recommend to the full Senate for vote to become the Comptroller General of the United States. A term for the Comptroller is fifteen years. The United States is on our 8th Comptroller. The Comptroller General reports to Congress and serves at the pleasure of the President. All investigations by the Comptroller come at the request of Congress and/or Committees or subcommittees within. It's up to Congress to enforce any action given by the Comptroller onto the Government at large. That said, since 1996 since consolidated reporting began, no Comptroller has agreed to the veracity of the Federal Budget and have called upon Congress to hold various departments (especially the DoD) to higher standards for transparency and book keeping. There's been marginal progress on the various aspects Congress has sent the GAO after, but it's up to Congress to stop getting into finger pointing matches and actually do the things to hold the US more accountable.
The GAO does this regularly.
Have you heard of the Government Accountability Office
The IRS doesnt audit the government the GAO does.
The Pentagon is easy: they lose money that is spent on black ops/projects so they don’t have breadcrumbs to highlight what they might be. You know, after they have had their contractors pad their non classified projects to the maximum dollar value believable. Someone there knows where every penny went. They just aren’t telling us and playing stupid.
> The Pentagon is easy: they lose money that is spent on black ops/projects so they don’t have breadcrumbs to highlight what they might be. You know, after they have had their contractors pad their non classified projects to the maximum dollar value believable. Like full stop, the top secret budgets are absolutely accounted for and some members of congress have security clearance to review the granular budget for them. Has nothing to do with it. Black budgets are accounted for. Nothing is lost. What explains why the DoD fails audits is the amount of shit they actually have to keep track of. It's LITERALLY the largest organization on the planet. By every single metric. Amount of people, budget, inventory, square feet, etc. Imagine having to audit the largest organization on the planet, that has had a terrible record system for a long time. Now imagine what makes it worse is members of the military throwing shit away without documenting it. This has accumulated a a black hole in terms of actually being able to keep track of stuff. Despite this, the audit the DoD has been increasing the percentage of stuff accounted for with every audit.
Respectfully, if I routinely lose important paperwork, and I have a history of having really shitty record systems, that usually indicates “okay, stop, fix the system.” - Not “Well, just keep doing what’s not working.” - Why doesn’t that apply to large government entities? A failed audit for me is a “drop everything and fix it” problem, why not for them?
There was no federal requirement for them to audit it until in the 2000s. They weren't doing DoD wide audits. Each branch would do audits for themselves, document stuff their own way, etc. They literally ARE doing what you suggest?!?! Imagine that, they are trying to fix the issues with the audits and every audit they do it comes closer to accounting for all of their inventory/budget/etc. The problem is the 50 years proceeding it not requiring audits. So a lot of shit has been lost track of.
It *was* fixed, two decades ago. Firstly, the "missing" Pentagon money was never missing in the first place, every single cent was accounted for across many disparate internal accounting systems, some of which didn't have adequate audit trails. Secondly, the government then spent three years unifying and modernising the DoD's internal accounting systems and by 2004, the figure had dropped from $2.3tn to a few hundred million. In 2019 the Pentagon again confirmed that its external audit "did not identify instances where DoD does not know where obligated dollars are being spent."
I know the first point is deceptive, but point taken. They never lost track of the money in Ukraine. The military revised the estimated value of the equipment sent, it wasn’t money. Then Russian trolls and USful idiots went apeshit per usual.
This post is misleading. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said a detailed review of the accounting error found that **the military services used replacement costs rather than the book value of equipment that was pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine. She said final calculations show there was an error of $3.6 billion in the current fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended last Sept. 30.** In California, they know how the money was spent, but they didn't track the homeless population. There is so much right wing bullshit on this forum. OP posts article links, but doesn't read them.
In reality, they may have actually kept track of where it went, but are unable to disclose the information. It simplifies things a lot just to say "don't know where it went"
The IRS doesn’t come after such small amounts unless you are hitting an automated check - which means someone submitted a tax form already.
To be fair, $601.73 is a lot easier to track than $2.5 Trillion
Gift tax is up to $18,000 per recipient so this meme is fucking stupid anyhow.
This is referring to a rule that third party payment processors have to send out 1099k's for business accounts who have transactions over $600. This rule doesnt actually change what is taxable just puts more responsibility on Venmo for reporting. It also doesnt affect Venmo users who dont have business accounts.
No-one who buys this has worked in a large organization. Low level procedural errors stack up very quickly into sums that embarrass leadership. Then you add organizational chaos that can change all sorts of variables, cancelled projects, structural changes, system changes, etc.
The fact that you put an accounting error in Ukraine’s favor first yet completely skipped over the massive PPP fraud of 2020 means you’re probably getting your ‘facts’ from a bad source. Over $200 billion dollars given to already rich Americans was spent fraudulently and you’re worried about the fact that our government over valued previous aid to Ukraine by $6.2 billion? It’s not even money, it’s overvalued equipment and as with the majority of aid to Ukraine, more aid just means more money spent in America to create more equipment. What exactly do you hate about $6.2 billion more spent on manufacturing jobs?
Track doesn't necessarily mean missing. Most of the time it's because they didn't follow proper protocol because the controls weren't implemented fast enough. Not even talking about system updates/upgrades/movement.
Donald Trump: I've grifted billions in my life and am bilking millions of people as you read this.
Gifts need to be over 18k for the IRS to care.
I really, really hate these insane figures that are "unable to track", because it's literally not what happened, those trillions of dollars represent the entire budget of the entire DOD for years. You know any army privates who didn't get paid for years? What actually happened is that it's difficult to audit. So, Accounting 101: Every single transaction has many, many follow on transactions. Like take a cheeseburger - you buy it for $1, and McDonalds gets $1. That's the first one. But McDonalds puts it in the store account for new receipts, then the next day that $1 gets split into the operational account, payroll, and franchise fees. Keep it simple and assume those are all $.33. The franchise fees go to McDonalds corporate, generating another transaction (and its own set of follow on transactions that I don't know enough about corporate accounting to speak to). The payroll gets split across 11 employee accounts, who each get $.03. Then those are split into SS withholding, actual pay, and insurance at $.01 each. The operating account, lets say $.10 of that goes to real estate, $.10 to supplies, and $.13 to utilities. That one cheeseburger has generated dozens of transactions, and a failure to reconcile one account to another (like that missing penny at the beginning, do to a rounding error) will show dozens or hundreds of dollars of transactions that don't match. That happens when you've got separate accounting systems with different rules that span decades - they don't talk to each other easily or at all. It's not about missing money, it's transactions that don't match up and require an accountant to do the legwork, which gets real tough real fast. Of course, businesses don't actually split each individual transaction like that, but they will do it in aggregate. Just pretend the cheeseburger you bought was the sum total of sales for the day, and you're on the right track.
None of these things are true.
Tax prep reform is really needed because the government has all of my data.. why can’t they do the tax prep and tell me?
The answer is incredibly simple: they absolutely do not have all of your data. They have one data point, the income that was reported to them by your employer, assuming you are a W2 employee. They know literally nothing else. The IRS does not know if you are married, had a kid, bought a house, sold a house, paid property tax, paid mortgage interest, paid student loan interest, paid out of pocket healthcare costs, made investment income, had a side job, inherited money, etc. You file your taxes because they have no way of knowing any of that until you tell them.
You have to commit pretty serious tax fraud to have any chance of going to jail. And.. we dont let the IRS audit the government. Id bet if we did, theyd find that shit. Theyre really, really fuckin good at their jobs.
Someone has no idea how gifts are taxed in the US.
They audited me a few years ago because I qualified for $40 in EITC. After a year of calling, waiting on hold for 90 minutes (it automatically hangs up after that long, “courtesy disconnect”), and *faxing* documents they approved my refund and paid $60 in interest. I also got a 1099-INT to pay taxes on that interest.
Why would the IRS care that you didn't report giving money away?
This is a direct result of not funding the IRS. When they only have the resources to do an inch-deep audit, that means all their auditors have a whole lot of poors to work through. That 80 billion dollars to fund the IRS was already having great results from the wealthy - which is probably why Republicans immediately clawed most of that funding back.
The big government apologists in this thread make me sick. It’s a boot that you’re licking guys - that’s not a lollipop
Would a president who wants to decrease the power in the government help? Honest question.
Texas: we’re not going to disclose how we’re using the 47.1 million we got this year from the opioid payout. None of it.
The humanitarian causes are measured in billions. The corporate causes are measured in trillions. Weird. It's almost like all those "welfare queens" the right imagines aren't the ones draining all the country's resources.
Interesting how the works huh?
Tax returns for the common man is simple, anything other than that needs a bit more knowledge, but just like any job, you can learn how to do it. Government spending is ridiculous and the business class is the reason why. Soon as a government contract is created the .50 cent gum packs turn into 45 dollars. And the government just says okay. The shit is stupid.
So when's the protest? 😀
Every federal deficit post here is just the Steve Carell meme from Anchorman with “BIG NUMBERS” instead of “LOUD NOISES”
It's easier to get money from poor people.
Attorney for my states' version of the IRS. It's so cute evey time I see people post about the IRS knowing what you owe.
No shit, I paid my MA state taxes on time, just got a bill friday for another 186 dollars, and they had the balls to charge me interest. Meanwhile the just signed a billion dollar deal to take care of all the illegals flooding here.Thats not hyperbole. Great.
Funding for the IRS directly correlates to catching more billionaire tax fraud, at a rate where the tax system makes back far more money than is spent. It is because the IRS is weak, that they can only target the middle and lower classes. As it stands, they cannot stand up to the billionaire class’s armies of tax lawyers.
Sure would be nice if corporate America didn't rule America's governments.
move somewhere with no taxes and no government
Oh fuck am I supposed to report gifts of that value? I didn't know that, am I actually fucked or is this just a joke?
Gift Tax only kicks in after $18,000 to a single person ($10,000 to two people for $20,000 total would be fine) in a single year with some exceptions around gifting assets instead of cash. Anyone in a position to gift that much money can afford a few hours with a financial advisor to get everything sorted out.
I have a way. Nuke Switzerland and the Caymin Islands and see who cry's the most.
I'm not a conspiracy nut, but that DoD annouced that they couldn't accound for 2.3 trillion 9/10/2001. Next day and no one talks about it because of the attacks. Seems way to convienent
Which means they 100% could be keeping track of it and are choosing not to. Waste, fraud, and/or abuse
It's the largest, most well-funded (by your money) racketeering organization in human history.
You're not wealthy and powerful so there's no repercussion for going after you
Many of these claims are nonsense. Esspecislly the 6.2 billion ukraine one. 40 million of their own money was found to stolen from corrupt officials. 1 billion in foreign aid was poorly tracked and were not certain where every exact weapon has went. Both of those things are very different than the claim here.
I wonder what the country would be like if there was no corruption.
That whole meme is fake news
Holy fuck we are fucked
Well the bottom is correct unless neither of you report in any method that the transaction was made but then you get into laws about how much of monetary value can you gift without reporting it in your state. Right now as long as you stay below 17k USD it is not required. The problem is no one ever knows it exists until they get a letter in the mail that they are charged with not reporting income.
Typically it’s a matter of cost. It’s really expensive to track money. That’s a major reason why government projects are so expensive. Especially defense spending. It costs a dollar to track a dollar
What are you going to do about it?
Nonsense fake numbers
Behold a bad faith argument that totally misrepresents the basic facts of each point and conflates different ideas and presents them as the same type of scenario.
u/repostsleuthbot
Now apply this to the private sector…Wasting money, is wasting money.
In reality, the IRS is severely underfunded. Which in turn means that the U.S. Treasury is underfunded because it can’t enforce its laws against major tax cheats. Which hurts everyone else. And even against major tax cheats, what it wants is the money. So it’ll give you chance after chance after chance to pay what you owe before criminal charges are even thought of. But don’t let me interrupt libertarian anti-government agitprop with reality. Like the reality that most nations would kill to have agencies as effective as the White House, Pentagon, and Treasury.
if they need help finding that lost money i volunteer my services
Not that it matters much, but you would not have to report sending someone over $600. Different than earnings or lottery winnings. Also, even if you exceeded the reportable threshold on a gift you're nowhere close to the taxable amount on gifts.. But still
Yet they track the fuck out of us!
why are we so far in debt again? lol...
South Carolina: we don’t know why we have 1.9 billion in excess.
That last one is not at all how that works. If you sent $601.57 to your friend to do an actual job, asked him for a W-9 or his SSN and address, and filed form 1099 with the IRS to report the contract payment, they would know and would correct his taxes if he failed to include it. But there's not exact mechanism I know of by which they would automatically pursue anything if you didn't. They just started requiring reporting from CashApp etc as they do banks. If you failed to file a 1099 and they caught you, there's a fine per missing 1099 but it's not high. A lot of small business owners mess that up. I feel like learning about tax filing and proper books retroactively is a right of passage for first year business owners. Ultimately it's on the friend to pay their taxes whether they get a 1099 or not.
My assumption, especially in pentagon and treasury spending, is that they just aren't willing to admit where the money was spent.
What is this MAGA-chud nonsense?
I get irony, but, technically, they are two different topics. It is implied that IRS know you have received 600 hence it can track the income, but it can't, it merely automated the chase for reporting which is also what other deparments are doing.
6.2B dollars dollars
Sick I'm sure there's no greater context or anything associated with these entirely believable and true claims put forth with no source
Meme Creator: I have no idea how money or the government works.