How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing

Re:How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing by JimWestergren on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @11:07AM (#5443771)

My guess is that at least 85% of the population of Sweden does not have any deductions and can just accept the prefilled values from the tax office (employees). For a normal employee there are not so many deductions you can do. I guess travel to and from work is the most common deduction. But if you have a business (not a corp) things is of course very different.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing by ScottWhigham on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @11:18AM (#5443836)

That's what my guess was. In that environment then, a government system clearly works well. I wish I had stats about how many US tax returns have deductions - I'd assume it's close to 100%.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing by mjn on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @12:23PM (#5444321)

It's actually 35%, if you don't count people who file with just the standard deduction. While technically a "deduction", the standard deduction is pretty dead-simple to compute. It only gets more complicated if you're taking itemized deductions, and that's about 1/3 of taxpayers (though that's still a high proportion of itemized filers compared to many countries).

Source: http://taxfoundation.org/article/most-americans-dont-itemize...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing by ScottWhigham on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @03:15PM (#5445428)

Excellent - I should've chosen "itemized" and then, of course, the percentage is lower than 100%. Thanks for the link - good info.

[ Parent | on HN ]