PAYE (Pay As You Earn) is automatic for all employees. Anything more complicated involves a P11D ie "benefits".
Self assessment nowadays gets all P60 details pre filled in. I run a closed company with two other directors and 20 odd employees. My tax affairs are pretty simple - I don't do anything fancy. It takes me abut 30-60 mins to fill in the HMRC SA questionnaire online. I get a tax calc at the end and I cough up my tax. Dealing with shares etc is pretty straightforward because there is statutory reporting - ie each year you get a standard form declaring all relevant amounts and what to do.
Taxation in the UK is pretty easy to deal with unless you want to take the piss, in which case you don't have a leg to stand on.
I've been on the receiving end of a HMRC audit and I don't recommend it. Bizarrely I came out better off when they found some additional things I could claim for, which more than offset my cock up that caused the audit, including the fine! That was for a former small business I ran (pre IR35) and I had an accountant, that I promptly fired for obvious reasons.
The US is also "pay as you earn" and automatically gets deducted from salaries. For most people working as employees, the tax return is just for you to confirm your numbers with the government's, specify any deductions if necessary, and see if you owe any extra or are entitled to a refund.
I am honestly surprised that learning how to fill out the IRS form is not part of the high school curriculum.
The software to make this isn't too complicated. This has more to do about being able to legally distribute it since an open-source solution could have been distributed already, but there is too much liability in doing so.
If you want to add e-file to the software, you have to be approved by the IRS and that's where the lobbying/corruption comes into play.
> For most people working as employees, the tax return is just for you to confirm your numbers with the government's, specify any deductions if necessary, and see if you owe any extra or are entitled to a refund.
In the UK, for most people working as employees there is no tax return. There's no numbers to confirm, no deductions, no extras.
Yeah, at this point a bunch of European countries have this setup. As long as you don’t have a complicated source-of-revenue situation (which is true for vast majority of population), you just confirm the tax return on a governmental app and you’re done.
It’s extremely convenient, after they implemented a couple of years back, the time needed for tax return each year got down to maybe 2 min if you can use a computer.
Some take it even further. Inaction is considered approval. So you do not even need to confirm anything at all. You are likely to get tax return on your account automatically. Or a bill send at you. Or you can update details if needed.
Still, you have some years to ask for correction even after that, but as usual it is somewhat more complicated.
It's not even that hard if you have a discrepancy. Here in the UK, if you end up with a discrepancy (starting. Anew job, or benefits changes) and it's wrong, 98% of the time a single phone call will resolve the issue.
