U.S. citizens are taxed on their worldwide earnings, which means expats are supposed to file their taxes twice. Mostly this isn't an issue unless you live someplace with ridiculously low taxes (Isle of Man, anyone?) since foreign tax paid is usually higher than it would be in the US. Unless they get smacked by the AMT, it is usually just a paperwork headache for expats. But that's just assuming you are using something simple like manual paper filing. If instead you are unlucky enough to choose software by Intuit, you're in for an aneurysm.TurboTax does such a tremendously lousy job at handling foreign earnings and tax credits that it is unbelievably easy to get it wrong: as a matter of fact, it might not even be possible to get your taxes right while using it. Apparently this is considered just a minor corner case by the geniuses at Intuit, provided they've even tried to accomplish this task at all. I hope the IRS writes its own tax software and puts them out of business. And I hope all of the perpetrators of this software starve, that their entire communities collapse, and that they walk the desert highways, wailing, their cries lost upon the wind.
4 comments:
Ah, nothing brings about greater levels of scorn than taxes. I enjoyed this rant.
I struggled with Intuit this year on the AMT calculations. I paid AMT the past two years, so this year, when I learned that I wouldn't be paying AMT, I was eager to start recouping some of the previous years paid AMT.
But for some reason, I could not get TurboTax to release the AMT. I had to install the previous three years of TurboTax (good thing I kept those CDs) to pull out the obscure numbers from previous years' returns.
And, yet, I couldn't realize a refund of AMT. I have no f---ing clue.
Instead of getting the IRS to write the SW (this is truly scary... I've seen government software!), perhaps a simplification of the tax code would be nicer?
Oof, soon the Isle of Man may not be so great for US citizens. Obama's got a proposal to come after ALL low tax jurisdictions, and we're squarely on his list!
Wow! A comment from a real Mann resident! Unbelievable!
Yeah, it's like seeing a unicorn at Target!
I believe even less in a simplification of the tax code than I do in unicorns, but then I do sometimes suffer a failure of imagination. Faulting externalities such as invasions, tax codes tend to grow like coral reefs (or old operating systems) with layer upon layer of cruft surrounding old structures that no longer serve their original purpose, but entangled with so many other things that it becomes nearly impossible to extricate them. I do hope I'm wrong.
I've been living in the corporate world for a long time, and I must say there's some nasty cruft there as well. I don't think government has any monopoly on bad code. But if tax law were passed as code instead of words, then it would have to work in order to pass. I look forward to tax bills being written in Perl.
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