Well, if the IRS gets it wrong they'll come back and declare the taxes you filed are wrong and send you a bill. Maybe also trigger an audit.
This system would be way better since you get to see the error up front and deal with it immediately instead of waiting 8 weeks for the process to start and your refund to languish for another month or two before it is all sorted out.
Well that's the thing, the IRS can wait 3 years (or 6 if the error was bad enough), then look at your taxes, and pound you with 4%/year, instead of setting up a job to look at everything right away.
The work is already being done. Try putting some incorrect numbers into your tax return this year. Sometime after you file, you'll probably get a letter informing you of the mistake, telling you how much your actual tax liability differs from what you filed, and either a check or a bill for the difference.
Tax errors can, and are, routinely corrected. There's an error tolerance for taxes that is way, way higher than for voting. What if you realize three months after the fact that your taxes are off? Might be a big problem, but not as big a realizing three months after the fact that election results are wrong.
But it’s not an appeal. It would be the exact same process as if you filed your taxes for the first time.
And for most people the tax bill that arrives would be correct. The parts that wouldn’t be correct would be if there are deductions you’re eligible for, that the IRS may not have any documentation of.
The worst part about taxes is that I never know if I did them correctly since the feedback loop is up to 3 years. Just shoot them off into the ether and cross your fingers you don't get a giant bill next year.
The first time I filed, I had not updated my W4 soon enough after moving and owed NYC like $4k in taxes which came up around 18 months after I filed. The following year the software I was using said I owed around $10k in taxes, which I was pretty sure was wrong, so I went to an accountant and they did it for me and said I owed nothing. Even after all that, there is no way to know who is right until 3 years from now (IRS theoretically doesn't look back more than 3 years for individual returns).
For the past three years I have filed my taxes myself, and every single time I make a mistake +- $100 or so, the IRS sends a correction, I fill out more paperwork and send payment / receive refund.
Y'all know this is inefficient. I spend at least 20 hours of work filing my taxes each year, and as a fairly intelligent citizen I always make a mistake anyway.
In my experience the IRS will get back to you within a few months if there are errors at most with exactly the information you described. Where is this 6 years coming from?
Thanks for that tip. In our case, the error was due to a missing form, and when I corrected it in Turbo Tax, my number was close enough to the IRS number, so I called it a day.
They do anyway. One year, I must have screwed up my return, because I got a letter from the IRS saying: We think you screwed up, here's why, send us X amount, and we're good. Or you can file an amended return.
That's fine, as long as you are still solving the original problem in the required time. The IRS won't excuse that you missed filing your withholding data on time because you were making the reporting tool easier to extend upon later.
Well, I thought so too. Until I realized six months later that I hadn't gotten my refund. Turns out that I'd gotten an email shortly after submission that had gone unnoticed saying that my return had failed xml validation, just like you. What was the point of the frontend validation before submission? Why isn't the full validation done before submission properly? Total nonsense.
I re-filed with paper... still hasn't showed up on the IRS website.
You didn't cover the most important—and political—reason: it would delay refunds.
2019 deadlines for 1099-INT/DIV (i.e., the forms you get from your bank or brokerage) are April 1st. The IRS filing window opened January 29, with 90% of tax returns processed within 21 days. Since the IRS can't reliably pre-populate a tax return without all the required information, it would delay filing (and refunds) by 8 weeks.
As the tax refund check is the largest check many Americans receive every year, delaying that payout gets taxpayer advocacy groups up in arms and is tantamount to political suicide.
Incidentally, this same gap is where a bulk of tax return fraud happens—equalling billions of dollars. In short, if you file return before the IRS has all the information to validate that return is indeed correct, they'll usually shrug and accept it. By the time they get all the information they need, you've cashed out your refund debit card and are long gone.
I haven't seen any analysis that such a system would lower revenues (indeed, it would stop billions of dollars of fraud and tax evasion), or that the deductible system is too complex.
This system would be way better since you get to see the error up front and deal with it immediately instead of waiting 8 weeks for the process to start and your refund to languish for another month or two before it is all sorted out.
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