It has been a busy week in the house doing the last bits of preparation for our next round of visitors. The amount of “stuff” that has been crammed into cupboards and drawers has resulted in the lower floor of the house looking tidy. I have been climbing ladders to reorganise the tops of shelves and cabinets into an aesthetically pleasing manner. The days flew by with progress in the house, but not much happening outside.
The final onslaught will be soon over, and then Clare and Jonathan arrive on Friday next week. So, in the absence of much great new news, here is
Robin’s Thoughts on America
Continuing my intermittent Thoughts, Likes and Dislikes section, here is my personally opinionated thought for this week on life in USA.
Tax Refunds
After Christmas, the TV adverts we are bombarded changed their focus – suddenly the number of lawyers promoting their services increased. I have heard that there is nothing like a holiday for sharply increasing the divorce rate. Maybe the (albeit limited) time off work prompted people to think of suing someone.
But now the focus has moved on (though there are still lots of aggressive lawyers advertising). There are adverts (mostly with a signature luminous green colour) offering assistance in filling out your annual tax return. The TV adverts show warehouses (and even the deck of an aircraft carrier or a military transport plane – bringing the military into your advert is a subliminal symbol that you are a true patriot and obviously honest!) stuffed full of money. But why the adverts on TV (or even standing by the side of the road in fancy dress waving a big banner, if you are a small scale practitioner of the dark arts of taxation)?
In USA, it is a very important part of being a citizen that you submit a tax return every year to the IRS. Actually, there is a need for submissions for both the state as well as for the federal government. This can be a very cumbersome procedure. Ever-increasing complexity of personal taxation (as special interest groups have persuaded the authorities to provide tax exceptions) are counterbalanced by the need to provide all sorts of supporting documentation. The real imperative for tax payers is to ensure they pay the minimum amount of tax into the grasping hands of all those nasty bureaucrats in Washington. Getting the largest possible tax refund cheque from the IRS demonstrates that you have got one up on the government. The refund cheque is also seen as a way of saving a nest egg or paying down debts (see my blog of 2nd November last year for thoughts on that issue!).
And what better way is there to achieve this than by using a professional tax form submitter who knows all the tricks and loopholes. So, tax form filling is a big business at this time of the year. But amongst the bright hopes of a potential tax refund lurks a few dark shadows.
There is a significant crime problem caused by the refunds. Fraudulent tax returns are sent in for real people who have had their personal details hacked. Resulting tax refunds are diverted to the criminal. It’s a real problem – it even shows up in the weekly crime reports of our local paper, the Dahlonega Nugget.
More perplexing to me is why people get refunds at all. Employers make tax deductions from wages and pay these to the government through a system like the British PAYE. By providing your employer with proper details of your tax status, you should be able to achieve a balance at the end of the year where the amount of tax owing or to be refunded is minimal. But people keep on loaning their money to the government interest-free through the overpaid taxes. Perhaps that’s proof of the patriotic nature of American taxpayers.