Have you heard of people paying fines for getting their taxes slightly wrong?
I know people who spend 5 minutes filling out the form with rough adjusted guesses based on the previous year, send it in, and thus trigger the IRS sending the corrected version.
They will charge you extra [edit: I meant "the amount you owe"] if you underestimate, but this is hardly a fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
they really don't get too mad. I do it by hand, sometimes using a calculator, and they just send you a correction. mostly its been in my favor. California taxes are based off of federal, so CA used to get kind of pissy because eventually they would find out about the correction somehow. last year they send me a notice within a couple days of the IRS
I once got a correction was was completely accurate. TurboTax has hidden something in a worksheet that errantly added something twice. The IRS corrected it and sent me a notice to let me know the correct value. It did reduce my refund, but it was correct.
Often times you correct it with more paper work. One year, my foreign tax deduction didn’t get filed for some reason (I was doing my own taxes by hand and sending in the forms), so I was hit with a huge tax bill of $30k or so. Then I found out I handled my non-resident wife wrong, so amend 1040X wait for ITIN, etc…it was kind of a mess. I wound up ahead, the IRS owing me instead. They were quite courteous about it on the phone.
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.
I wonder if this is a backdoor into having the IRS mail you your completed form to sign and send back, like many other countries do. Just file a 1040-EZ every year with only your personal details and everything else zeroed out, and then look over what comes back in 6 months. :D
Out of curiosity, did you ever track down the reason of your miscalculation? I agree tax forms have many moving parts, but at the end of the day is math, so you should be able to exactly redo the calculations and see where you or TurboTax screwed up.
I had a friend in college who hated doing taxes so he spent 5 min putting whatever numbers into the forms.
A few months later the IRS sent a "your filed incorrectly, here is the corrected return" and he'd be like "cool".
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