Every year, my next door neighbor went down to the local strip mall to have his taxes done, by a professional tax preparer.
The company advertised on prime time. He had no reason not to trust them.
My neighbor had grown up in the Depression. His mother was a widow. His family focused more on survival than schooling.
So, no surprise that he had someone else do his taxes.
What he didn’t know was that his “professional tax preparers” had had a three week training course. They weren’t quite the expert the company advertised.
My neighbor worked for H.J. Heinz for a number of years. When he retired, he became the neighborhood grump, feuding with everyone and, regularly, threatening to call the cops.
Nobody was really sad, when the old grump died, until we found out there was a $20,000 tax lien on his house, which his children couldn’t afford to pay. So, the house was abandoned, and, last I saw it, it was vacant, and falling apart. He and the IRS had a misunderstanding, thanks to his “professional tax preparer”, who had had a three week training course.
There’s the problem. Our federal income tax is set up to benefit H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, Turbotax, and assorted similar profitable enterprises.
We need a saner, simpler tax code. One people like my next door neighbor could handle on their own. They do this in other countries.
Anti government, in this country, frequently means anti IRS. People who struggled to understand complex forms. Who were hit with hefty fines, because they didn’t understand line 47 C. Or, because their “Professional Tax Preparer” didn’t know what he was doing. See the whole government as being behind one agency.
The fact that Republicans have cut funding for the IRS for several decades hasn’t helped matters.
When Biden increased funding for the Internal Revenue, Republicans brought out fake stories about agents being armed, and tax payers being threatened.
The fact is, your refund may be late in coming, because the IRS is underfunded and understaffed. If more people understood that, they might have more funds.
At present, it isn’t unusual for a CEO to pay less in income tax than his secretary.
What’s worse, there are people, most of them Republicans, who think this is okay.
I think it’s time we had a tax code people could understand, without help from H&R Block or Turbotax. I think it’s time people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump paid their fair share.
The economy is booming right now. If “professional tax preparers” lost their jobs, they could probably find new ones right away. It might be at Burger King, but minimum wage is going up.
Progressives need to push for a saner tax code. They need to do it now.