A tangential comment given your mention of whatever 99 B form:
Every time HN discussion about US taxes comes, I imagine a sizeable group of users from developed country watch in amusement the craziness that the IRS makes its taxpayers go through to charge them money.
I know in Mexico and Chile everything is highly automated. In Mexico 50%+ of working class dont have to do ANYTHING, as whatever tax stuff needed is submitted by their employer.
Come on US... that we in Mexico have better automation for this is inconceivable. We look up to you for lots of things, particularly technology.
1099-anything, by definition, doesn't come from an employer. They're for other sources of income (brokerage sales, interest, etc.).
The US would need to vastly simply the tax code - remove all the various tax breaks for dependents/spouses, remove the progressive taxation scale, etc. - before it could be successfully automated.
I don't think this is true. For pretty much everyone except either small business owners or the very wealthy with exotic assets, the government already gets all the forms it needs to calculate all your taxes (employers send W-2s, brokerages already send 1099s, your bank sends your mortgage statement to calculate things like mortgage interest deductions, etc.). There's no reason it can't be automated for 9 out of 10 people.
I've got REITs. I've got pension investment. I've got a house I'm getting interest off of, I've got stock, both Mexican and US (TQQQ and chill!), and I work at a company earning enough to HAVE to go into the Mexican IRS portal do do my taxes "manually" (I.e. my employer cannot do it for me).
With all of that, I just get into SAT page, ask it to fill up everything with the data they already collected, review it, and agree on the $$$ they will give me back (yay mortage!).
It CAN be that simple. that's what systems are for: to automate complex processes. Computers excellent at it.
Blame this on the "government can't do anything right" party that gets into power and then proves themselves correct by shutting down efforts for the government to actually do things (because ideology).
Not really because FreeTaxUSA asks questions about whether there are state specific bonds that have already collected taxes, whether the investment qualifies as a foreign investment, etc... That requires digging in a bit.
Foreign taxes are lines 7 & 8 on the summary. A brokerage account shouldn't have state bonds, and I thought those were in line 12, but I can see how that would be more confusing.
