Racing Turtles

HEY ACTUALLY THIS IS NOT LEGAL if the jets and yachts are being used for personal purposes!The IRS is as we speak cracking down on this exact behavior, along with a slew of other illegal tax evasion techniques that rich people use.

There are tons of unfair rules, but a lot of them can, in fact, be solved!!! Biden invested in the IRS, and now they have the resources to go after the rich folks who simply didn't give a fuck about paying their taxes.

And it's working! The IRS has already collected $500m in unpaid taxes from just a thousand millionaires, and there are early reports of rich people freaking out and trying to get their taxes paid before they get audited.

(Obligatory: the GOP is actively trying to repeal the funding that made this possible so their rich friends can keep cheating the system, vote blue in November!!!)

29 BILLION?!?!

The IRS has collected more than $500 million in back taxes from delinquent millionaires (MarketWatch)

How a Maneuver in Puerto Rico Led to a $29 Billion Tax Bill for Microsoft (ProPublica)

IRS Free File (btw your taxes are due THIS MONDAY!)

you have to guess and if you get it wrong you go to jail for a long time

1) only if you’re lying on purpose to hide taxable income or claim deductions you don’t qualify for (like, don’t lie and tell the IRS you have a kid when you don’t). If you are wrong THEY WILL LET YOU KNOW AND SEND YOU A BILL. (Or if you’re wrong in the other way, they send you a check) Don’t stress about this as long as you’re not trying to commit tax fraud!

2) call the IRS with questions! It can take a while to get through the queue, but they are SUPER knowledgeable and helpful!! I have called in the past and they’ve been SO HELPFUL, and SO KNOWLEDGEABLE, and FIXED STUPID MISTAKES I MADE.

3) IF YOUR ADJUSTED GROSS INCOME IS UNDER 79K, YOU CAN USE FREE FILE, WHICH IS NEW THIS YEAR!!

Don’t fear the IRS. The wealthy do, and they want you to fear the IRS too, so you’ll vote for Republicans who want to strip the IRS of funding so they can’t audit rich people.

Friendly reminder as we head into tax season (for US Americans), that the major tax preparation companies are fully prepared to lie and mislead you into paying for their tax preparation software when you might qualify for free software through the IRS.

Don’t fall for their bullshit. Visit IRS Free File and see what services are available to you. The requirements vary depending on your household status and income, but if you make less than $79,000/year (which is nearly everyone I know), you probably qualify for something.

Happy tax season to my US followers

FOLKS, PLEASE…DO YOUSELVES A BIG BIG FAVOR AND STOP USING TURBOTAX!  IT IS USELESS NOW!!!

THE IRS website will let you fill out and file your return THERE ON THE IRS SITE.  You pay like $12 for the actual electronic filing process, and THAT’s IT!

Unless you have tremendous amounts of Schedule D stock shit, TurboTax is NOTHING BUT A RIPOFF!!!

The IRS website is EXCELLENT.  They allow you to look up your past returns, and have every bit of information you MIGHT POSSIBLY NEED!

FUCK TURBOTAX!

LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM IT!!!!!!!

Friendly reminder as well that if you’re making less than $66,000 a year, you don’t need to pay to file your taxes and also all tax-paying softwares (eg rhymes with FurboFax) have a free filing option hidden in their websites. 

Have at it kiddos:

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-just-tricked-you-into-paying-to-file-your-taxes

You can also use Freetaxusa Very user friendly.

Okay but this is serious, I work in retail and I had a lady come up and ask for 2 $500 Google play gift cards. We have been trained to look for these scams and to warn the customers NEVER give the card numbers over the phone unless you have met this person face to face. I told the lady this and she started crying, saying they were the IRS and that if she hung up they would call the police and have her arrested. They wanted to keep her on the phone so she couldn't call her husband, who was more aware of how the IRS works. I was able to convince her to hang up and call the police on *them* instead, and saved her $500.

Scams are serious, people lose a lot of money and older people are targeted the worst because they're easy targets.

First of all, the IRS will *never* call you and ask for money, and they definitely won't call the cops on you. They'll get your money if they really want it through taxes.

But now they're trying to target our generation using crypto, which is super hard to trace if the money gets lost. So they're getting smarter, and they'll use whatever they can to get you to give them money.

What you really need to know or take away from this is: NEVER, and I mean EVER, buy a gift card and give the barcode number on the back to someone over the phone. It is ALWAYS, 100%, a scam!

Please be safe and hang up on these fuckers the second they ask you to buy a gift card.

I had a young guy, couldn't be more than 25, who also fell for one of these scams.

He came into my store, and bought 2 $500 Visa cards (which are known to backfire, and be unviable if you buy too many). The one card did backfire, and wouldn't work, and thus, he began crying and panicking.

The guy told my coworker someone had a picture of him, and this person would get said picture to go viral if he didn't send them the numbers for the cards. The young man, panicked, broke down crying, and said he wasn't sure what to do.

My coworker told him to call the police.

Another older man, elderly, came in and bought a $500 Apple card, claiming it was for his lawyer who would send it to his kids.

This older man sent the numbers over the phone, then the "lawyer" claimed the numbers didn't work. The man was home by this point, and since he was disabled, he called the store asking politely, worriedly, for a refund. I told him he'd have to call Apple for a refund, since we can't do it and the card said it activated on our end.

He ultimately sent in his neighbor who tried talking to me, and I told her the same thing: she has to call Apple for a refund, the card is perfectly viable, and activated.

So some takeaways from all this:

Scammers will nearly always say the card doesn't work, even though they're actually activated

Scammers will nearly always ask for the maximum amount of payment available to a card (usually $500)

Scammers will nearly always blackmail you

The IRS will NEVER call you, that is illegal on their end, and they only communicate via mail

Anyone of any age can and will fall for these scams, so bear in mind these things, and do not fall for them yourself! Always call the police!!

Source

FOLKS, PLEASE…DO YOUSELVES A BIG BIG FAVOR AND STOP USING TURBOTAX!  IT IS USELESS NOW!!!

THE IRS website will let you fill out and file your return THERE ON THE IRS SITE.  You pay like $12 for the actual electronic filing process, and THAT’s IT!

Unless you have tremendous amounts of Schedule D stock shit, TurboTax is NOTHING BUT A RIPOFF!!!

The IRS website is EXCELLENT.  They allow you to look up your past returns, and have every bit of information you MIGHT POSSIBLY NEED!

FUCK TURBOTAX!

LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM IT!!!!!!!

Actually, with Free File it’s FREE

No $12 fee

That’s the point of free

If you make less than an income threshold you get to file for FREE using various softwares that are REQUIRED to be and stay free or they lose the license to work with the IRS as part of the Free File program

If you make more than that threshold you can file for FREE using the Free File Fillable Forms where you type in numbers and click “do the math” and the website does all your math for you

Also fuck turbotax, I’m not even allowed to use it because it’s inaccurate enough that I’d get fired since Congress mandated all IRS employees’ taxes need to be PERFECT as a condition of employment

For people with anxiety about filing taxes, here’s what things that happen when you make a mistake on your tax return:

- it gets corrected

- you get a letter in the mail either asking for some additional information or a letter showing the adjustment

- you pay the amount (there’s options for payment plans too!) or get a refund

Things that do not happen

- you’re “in trouble”

- you are charged with fraud

- you go to jail

I know that most people are probably just joking/exaggerating when they say a mistake on their return means they get thrown in jail but when I worked with the public I always would encounter people who believed that would happen and they would be panicking about it. So I like to put this out there every year because if I can even prevent one person from feeling that way, it’s worth it

Also the IRS will NEVER cold call you. If you get an upsetting phone call about your taxes it is a scam.

Hey, so, I work at the IRS, and this is not just accurate, it actively understates how much the IRS is willing to work with you.

Mistakes happen, and if you submit a paper return, a tax examiner (like me!) will check over your return to make sure numbers are on the right lines, forms are in the right order, and your return is complete. Sometimes that means we finish filling out forms for you, no joke. As long as you made a good faith effort, we do our best to help you.

We even do our best to help people who aren't filing in good faith, who are actively and blatantly trying to sneak something illegal by us. They get the same treatment as everyone else: we make sure entries are put on the right lines, we fix what forms we can, and adjust impossible deductions the same way we do with typos, even when it's really obvious a taxpayer is trying to sneak things by us.

There are very few circumstances where returns are taken out of our hands and routed to the serious, 'scary' departments, and believe me it is impossible to commit those kinds of fraud by accident. You have to go down some weird aggressive research rabbit holes to commit the kind of capital-F Fraud the IRS gets in a tizzy over.

Point is, the IRS is nowhere near as scary as you've been led to believe it is, and the folks that claim otherwise are either rich enough to have an agenda against the IRS, or they're vanishingly rare statistical outliers who fell through every crack and redundancy in the system.

As for the calling thing, @k-she-rambles is right, hoooo buddy the IRS will absolutely never ever cold call you, our accounts management people are so backed up that it's a miracle to get one on the line for taxpayers trying to call in. The only way I know of offhand that you're getting a legitimate call from the IRS is if you've received multiple forms in the mail and replied saying that it's okay for them to call you.

If you ever receive an alarming text, email or prerecorded message claiming to be from the IRS, that is a scammy scam scam, and you can and should report that via contact methods found at the IRS phishing reporting page here.

I have messed up my taxes a couple of times (Did you know your 401K gives you dividends and there's a form for that - Someone with 5 401K's and 3 personal brokerage accounts) in both directions (I forgot I'd dropped $6K in prepayments) in the same year and my only super-mild complaint is that they figured out the 401K thing 18 months later.

So I paid about $65 in taxes + interest on $100 of 401K income.

They are super-polite, only contact you by letter and it's really great.

Today I learned the IRS doesn’t audit rich people because it’s too much work.

just to chime in, saying that it’s “too much work” frames the IRS as lazy and not willing to work hard. The IRS can’t audit rich people because they don’t have enough money to pay for sufficient personnel to audit everyone who isn’t on anti-poverty programs.

This is directly because of conservatives.