Aside from excessive taxation and a penchant for heavy-handedness, the IRS is also notorious for something else: Giving a 10 word answer when a 1 word answer is adequate.
An example is found in an IRS article titled “Topic 301 – When, Where and How to File”. People want to know when, where, and how to file their income tax returns. Rather than creating something simple, the IRS backs up the information dump truck and unleashes a multitude of information. You can find Topic 301 at: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc301.html. Oddly enough, they don’t include information about WHERE to file your taxes (even though the title suggests it).
Here’s how I would have written this same document:
- – -
When should I file?
The deadline to file income tax is April 15th (or the first business day after April 15th if it falls on a weekend). Your paperwork and any taxes owed are due on or before that date. If you don’t file and pay on time, the IRS will assess penalties and interest against you unless you have reasonable cause for the late filing or paying. . You can view those in a list here. (Then I’d link to a list).
How should I file?
You can file your taxes in several different ways:
Mail it to the address that came with your return.
Drop it off at your local IRS office. (Then I’d link to a list of local tax offices).
Don’t forget to attach all of your forms! (Then I’d link to a list of forms to attach). If you owe back taxes , you may have more options than you realize, and you should contact a licensed tax professional before contacting the IRS to avoid wage and bank levies.
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That’s it! I said in less than 140 words what it took the IRS 1216 words to say. Not only that, I answered the questions that most people are going to want to know when they search for those answers. And, I offered a place for people to go if they indeed had further questions.
Here’s something that everyone in the world knows (except the IRS, apparently). Giving people good information is not about giving them more information than they could ever possibly use. It’s about anticipating what most people want to know and providing links to more.
Another tip that they might consider is to use a clickable table of contents at the top of each page. That way, when someone clicks on a link and they see more text than in War and Peace, they won’t skip it and call the local tax office (which is a huge waste of taxpayer’s money).
Unfortunately, the IRS isn’t known for its efficient use of your tax dollars. The IRS should avoid creating an overly complicated website that adds too many layers of information
Your recent election to the highest office in the land was a loud call from some American voters that they wanted you in office. And those who didn’t vote for you? Well, you’re their President, too. As you recognized at your inauguration, we live in challenging times.
I’m not here to talk about wars or the economy or the work you have to do in representing the millions of people who did, and who did not, elect you to office.
I’m writing this letter to remind you that the White House is not your house. It is my house… and the house of the millions of other taxpaying Americans who live in our great nation. In other words, the work you do and the decisions you make should always be guided by remembering the people on whose backs this nation is funded. You should follow the Constitution, and not do anything that contradicts it.
As a fellow American, representing other Americans, I write to you requesting the following considerations:
Don’t be drawn into Washington’s bad habits of spending millions of dollars without fully realizing that each and every one of those dollars came out of a taxpayer’s pay check. Plus the interest which must be paid to the government’s creditors
Remember that you were voted in my millions of people who have to work long days (and sometimes 2 jobs) because they are overburdened in the taxes they pay. If they paid less tax, they would have more to spend and spending is good for the economy.
Right now, you probably have other people preparing your income tax return for you because your focus is on the American impact of global affairs. But don’t forget that millions of Americans will have to prepare increasingly complicated income tax returns.
Bureaucracy is costly. While a small part of the government’s bureaucracy is Constitutionally necessary to run our country, simplicity and clarity should win out every single time. Your administration should model for American companies what a lean, efficient, spending-conscious organization should be like.
Your taxpaying public is made up of less well off people, middle class, and wealthy people. And all of those groups should be treated fairly and not punished. America is a land of opportunity, not class warfare. We shouldn’t tax the rich just to give to the less well off. That is a form of tyranny of the majority toward the minority. We all hope to someday do well, please don’t treat those folks who happen to be doing well like cash cows to be milked for the rest of Americans spending whims.
We’re a great nation in a world that is experiencing turbulent economic times, and our hard-working, taxpaying people are already suffering under a terrible tax burden. We need you to follow in the footsteps of our Founders and spend less on bailouts and things that will cause tax increases, and more on restoring the sense of limitless opportunity in this country!
A classic IRS “best practice” seems to be to give everyone way too much information. At times, their purposes are suspect (do we really need a bazillion forms to do our income taxes?). Other times, their purposes might be noble but their delivery is just plain overwhelming.
Case in point: The article entitled “Tax Return Preparer Fraud”, published at http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=167391,00.html. The article is actually helpful. Unfortunately, its helpfulness is buried under a pile of other information that doesn’t need to be there.
So, I’ll break out my decoder ring and help you to approach this article and gain the usefulness you need from it.
My first complaint with this article is the title – “Tax Return Preparer Fraud” seems to cover some of the information. The problem is that the article is much, much longer than it needs to be.
Next, we read four paragraphs that describe what tax return preparer fraud is and who is responsible. Not surprisingly, tax return preparers might be subject to criminal charges but the taxpayers are the ones who have to pay if their tax preparers are fraudulent. (While I admit that makes sense, one wonders if there would be fewer fraudulent tax preparers if they were expected to ALSO pay for any shortfall if their actions were deemed criminal).
Then, we read what turns out to be the best part of the article: Helpful hints when choosing a return preparer. Good work, IRS, at keeping your taxpayers informed. But why did you bury this helpful information deep within your site so that only a certified mining engineer could uncover this gold from this quarry of data?
The next section is entitled “Criminal Investigation Statistical Information on Return Preparer Fraud”. Just when we were thinking to ourselves “wow, this is a document from the IRS and it doesn’t contain any numbers”, along comes the statistical chart. In class IRS form, it tells us a lot without telling us anything. In Between 2004 and 2005, there was in increase in investigations initiated. Wow, an increase of nearly 25%! At first we might wonder if people were more criminally inclined in that year. Then we see that, between the 3 years stated, that year also had the lowest number of prosecution recommendations and sentences! I don’t know what that tells you, but it tells me that someone (hint: someone at the IRS!) wanted to LOOK busy because the boss was probably around. Hey, I’m all for honesty and full legal compliance. I’m against what appears to be excessive spending when it’s not necessary. Oh, and I’m also a little disturbed that these criminals get 18 months of electronic monitoring while their victims are likely spending years trying to repay and financially recover from their preparer’s fraud.
Lastly, we have a list of criminal and civil actions that the IRS has taken. Some might call this the “dirty laundry” list… I like to call it the “Look busy! The taxpayers are watching” list. It’s interesting reading, certainly, but not really helpful to taxpayers.
If I were writing this article, what would I do? I would break the content into 2 articles and put the actual helpful information into its own article because people should read it.
Who sings about the taxman? …a bunch of people, as it turns out.
This video uses “the Taxman” song by The Beatles and is clearly created by high school students. But the video is comical and the chase sequences remind me of many British comedies:
Or, if you like the song but prefer something a little more authentic, here’s the 1967 cartoon by The Beatles themselves:
Okay, I realize that those two videos weren’t technically about the IRS. But it does show that the problems we face with the IRS are not unique to the US. Rather, the taxman (and taxwoman) are universal problems.
Here’s a song, titled “The Tax Collector”, that your grandparents probably laughed at. It’s by Flanders and Swann. I can’t make out all of the words (and I’ve searched diligently for the lyrics and can’t find them) but it sounds pretty funny. In my opinion, it’s worth a couple of listens!
This song is a little more specialized. And his heart’s in the right place although I don’t think we’ll see this song on a Billboard chart any time soon.
And this song is about Fair Taxation… not surprisingly, it’s from the Fair Tax rally in South Carolina
Note: The links are here for informational purposes only. They are not an endorsement of the services or information provided (especially considering how many mistakes the IRS own personnel makes when they give out live advice for even simple issues).
GENERAL TAX INFORMATION
Three valuable links you should know before doing anything else.
http://www.irs.gov – Obviously! Yes, I realize it’s pretty unwieldy (they throw a lot of information at you) but it’s a good source of information.
INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR TAXES
These links will give you plenty of information about filing your taxes… Probably in greater detail than you need.
http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/index.html – This is the main resource page in which they try to corral their overwhelming number of forms and documents and resources and memos and publications into one place. You might need an advanced degree in astrophysics to understand most of it (and, perhaps, a crystal ball), but you can probably find what you’re looking for here.
http://www.irs.gov/faqs/index.html – This is the FAQ page. It’s divided into two sections. The first section is the “Top Frequently Asked Questions”, and it’s okay. More helpful is the second section, “Frequently Asked Question Categories”. As long as you know the category, you can drill down to the answer you need.
http://www.irs.gov/localcontacts/index.html – If the first three links are as obtuse as most people think they are, you have local tax offices who can help you. Click to this link to find them.
INFORMATION TO HELP YOU FILE
Be aware that tax filing companies might not always find the deductions you deserve nor might they be fully qualified to answer your tax questions, but they offer a fast, basic solution to tax filing.
http://www.hrblock.com/ – One of the most popular “retail”-style companies helping individuals file their income taxes.
There are two constants in life – death and taxes. Since neither one are events that people look forward to, it’s only natural that we fight both of them with tooth and nail. After all, taxation is the loss of our hard earned money… and death is the loss of, well, everything else.
We do our best to avoid death’s inevitability by eating right, exercising, cutting down on sweets and cigarettes, and making sure we look both ways before crossing the street.
And as for taxes – that’s a little more complicated.
You see, the IRS draws a line between tax avoidance and tax evasion. In general terms, here’s the difference:
Tax avoidance is when someone works within existing laws to pay the least amount of taxes that the IRS says are rightfully due from them. Tax avoidance is legal.
Tax evasion is when someone works outside of existing laws by not paying the taxes that the IRS says are rightfully due from them. Tax evasion is illegal.
Tax avoidance is perfectly legal, and the United States Supreme Court has recognized this fact. The Court has stated that “The legal right of an individual to decrease the amount of what would otherwise be his taxes or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.” See Gregory v. Helvering.
Let’s look at an example: Tax avoidance is when someone creates a legitimate company (like a home-based business) to take advantage of tax write-offs that come with owning a business that is producing a profit. The person actually sells goods or services in their spare time and reaps the rewards by being able to write-off a portion of their home and car. Tax evasion is when someone sets up a fake company, which doesn’t actually do any business, to hide income that they’re earning so that they don’t have to pay taxes on it.
Of course, that’s just one example but there are many others. In helping taxpayers with IRS taxation issues, I would heartily advise legal tax avoidance efforts. Some of those include:
Set up a profitable small business
Claim all deductions that you rightfully can claim
Put as much money as possible into your 401k
Having said that, let me now highlight a challenge that taxpayers are facing now and going to face in the future: The shrinking opportunity to legally avoid taxes. In some cases, tax loopholes exist which taxpayers are legally taking advantage of, but those loopholes are closing. In other cases, the IRS creates layer after layer of obfuscation and complexity so that tax advantages are minimized.
What can you do about it? Frankly, not much. When Congress and the IRS detect that their pockets have a small hole in them, resulting in precious nickels returning to the taxpayer’s pockets, you can be sure that they’ll get out the red tape and they’ll sew up their pockets to collect more.
But until then, take advantage of those opportunities!
Celebrities seem to live in their own little world. While the rest of us pack our lunches and punch the clock from 9 to 5 (or more like 8 to 6, these days), celebrities sit around and bask in their own fame. The British have their monarchy and we have our own version of it – celebrity. They live by their own rules and make bazillions of dollars by doing very little.
To borrow a line from the Spider-Man movie, with great wealth comes great responsibility (to pay taxes). And, like most of us, these people find taxation a difficult burden. And some of them don’t pay.
From time to time, I’ll highlight celebrities who run “afoul” of the IRS. Today’s celebrity: Wesley Snipes.
He played a nearly invulnerable half-vampire/half-human in the movie Blade but actor Wesley Snipes proved that he was not invulnerable to the government of the United States of America. Snipes evaded the law in such movies as Demolition Man (1993), US Marshals (1998), and Art of War (2000), and during that time, he evaded paying his taxes!
You can read all about Mr. Snipes tax evasion case at Wikipedia. To summarize, he was charged in 2006 with:
1 count of conspiring to defraud the United States
1 count of knowingly making or aiding and abetting the making of a false and fraudulent claim for payment against the United States
6 counts of willfully failing to file Federal income tax returns by their filing dates
Snipes was acquitted of most of these charges, with the exception of 3 of the 6 counts of willfully failing to file Federal income tax returns by their filing dates. He was sentenced to 3 years in jail. (Although not IRS-related, you might also be interested to know that Snipes has failed to pay property taxes on two homes he owns as well. It’s also referenced in this Wikipedia article.)
The moral of this story?
Don’t act in 3 movies where you play a hero on the run from the law! Sooner or later, that kind of fiction will turn into fact!
There are legal strategies you can use to pay less tax. Simply pretending you’re not an American citizen (which is what Snipes tried) doesn’t work.
If you owe unpaid taxes, I can help you. (If Mr. Snipes had called me instead, there is a high likelihood he wouldn’t be making license plates right now because I’d have asked him to file his tax returns).
Last year, most Americans watched as their investment portfolios and 401K’s vanished before their very eyes, as if they were conjured away by some twisted magician. After watching our home values erode and the date of our retirement stretch further and further into the future, we thought we’d been beat up enough.
Then, in December, this “turmoil” became something worse – a recession. And on its heels, there is some talk of a depression.
It certainly wasn’t easy for many Americans to celebrate during Christmas: Money is tight, unemployment is rising, homes are devalued, and the short-term outlook is not exactly positive. We all hoped that Santa was going to bring some good news. But it didn’t happen.
We all know what the economic turmoil means for us as consumers and employees. But what does it mean for us as tax payers? How does this recession impact our taxes? There are a few interesting things at work here.
There are stories like this grim report of California’s economyand this grimmer report of Illinois’ economy. Similar stories echo in one state after another. What is implied is that the provision of services at the local, state, and federal level is funded by your tax dollars. And I don’t know about your perspective, but in my experience, governments rarely seek out alternative funding methods and instead raise taxes, create new taxes, and/or increase pressure on their tax collectors to track down those who aren’t paying. So, on the one hand, governments are struggling and need to increase revenues to pay the bills.
At the federal level, something very different is beginning to take shape. Obama is moving into office in just a couple of weeks and he is putting together a stunningly large “stimulus” package intending to improve the economy. That’s good — if you believe in that sort of fiscal irresponsibility. Of course no one wants the economy to continue as it is, and whether we agree or not on whether such stimulus packages actually work or not, we’re about to be saddled with the mother of all stimulus packages –almost a trillion dollars.
A careful reading of the true economic history of the FDR era (as opposed to liberal statist propaganda which seeks to justify ever-enlarging government control and spending to create a nanny state) it is plain to see that the depression-era economy actually got worse the more government intervened with its many fixes. There were “unintended consequences”.If the stimulus package doesn’t work, we can expect a similar federal story to the state stories I mentioned earlier. But if the stimulus package does work, we will havemore people back at work. That’s a very good thing.Because we’ll need them to pay off that trillion dollars of government debt.
With the government owing a trillion dollars, Congress will likely do one of two things.They will either:
1)Attempt to make the people who still pay taxes pay even more taxes, or
2)They will attempt to make the non-taxpayers who don’t pay taxes start paying them.
Don’t hold your breath waiting on that second option to be enacted since that would take guts — something most politicians are in short supply of.
Maybe I’m just cynical, but those are the scenarios we may expect to see playing out in 2009.
An interesting article by Bill Frezza, dated Nov. 7, 2008, “Obama: Hope and Change or Duck and Cover?” appeared in RealClearMarkets.com. My comments on this article are not meant to be partisan, but it just so happens that these philosophical questions regarding the proper use of taxation, and of the IRS, are quite timely at this moment in history.
The truth is that in America every door is open to anyone who makes good choices in pursuit of a dream.
America is great, and it is a financial success. Some say that a large percentage of our fellow citizens living among us are poor and unable to help themselves without a handout, and we should use the power of the IRS to take money out of one person’s pocket to put it into another person’s pocket.
My own “poor” grandparents would be shocked to see how we are defining who is “poor” today. Almost all of what is called “the poor” in today’s America are much better off than my own grandparents who lived in rural Appalachia of the 20th century. It sounds hokey, but as recently as the mid-1970′s they had no indoor plumbing, and certainly no air conditioning, and they only had one automobile. When I lived with my grandmother for a time, my job each morning was to pour the chamber pots out into a special covered hole. I’ll never forget it. For those of you economically poor folks who don’t know what “chamber pots” are, they are the covered buckets you used the bathroom into if you had to use the bathroom during the night – either that or you walked down the trail to the outhouse in the dark. Their bed rooms, and mine, weren’t heated during the winter either. Such necessities are had by virtually all Americans now – as well as other necessities like cell phones and cable TV.
Being poor in America today is largely a state of mind – a state of mind constantly fostered by politicians who benefit from class warfare.
We owe the financial greatness of America to there being an atmosphere which helps fuel innovation, but I expect life on the front lines for small business persons and entrepreneurs may get much harder.
The entrepreneurs of American take outsized risks pursuing disproportionate rewards. How is this going to work in a culture that demonizes disproportionate rewards as the government shifts into overdrive to tax them away?
Entrepreneurs are every day folks who are dreamers. You cannot see the people they hope to employ nor hear their plans for change over the shouts of the entrenched entitled masses. If we make it a national goal to stamp out income inequality irrespective of its source, what happens when we succeed? No force of nature can make these rare and intrepid individuals quit their day jobs in hopes of striking it rich if you promise them that they can’t keep what they win. Just as they abandoned Europe to come here, where will they go next?
It is foolish to believe that if you tax businesses and entrepreneurs harder that they’ll just work harder. Socialism never works in the long run.
Pass all the laws you want to punish greedy entrepreneurs, small business persons, and corporations as you seek to squeeze the wicked “rich”, but don’t be surprised if the profits you hoped to tax and spread around evaporate or take flight. These people didn’t get “rich” by being stupid.
