this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
310 points (97.0% liked)
Asklemmy
44133 readers
563 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In all but the most niche cases, they do in fact know that you had a kid. That being said, most things they have a pretty good idea about (or could) and they could easily adopt the system that they do in a lot of other countries where the government sends to a tax form all filled out that says, “we think you owe this much.” Then you just provide the exemptions you listed.
This would save a considerable amount of time when I file my taxes by just being able to double check they got cost basis correct on stocks sold and applied appropriate credits for mortgage interest and what not.
How would the IRS know that? The only way I could think of would be the Social Security department sharing the information with the IRS; and are they legally allowed to do that? But let's even say that's true; if the parents aren't married and filing jointly, who gets to claim the child as a dependent? That's a decision made by the parents (or local courts in case of custody battles), so not something the IRS would decide.
Basically what it seems to boil down to is that filing taxes is complicated because the tax law is complicated.
I was assuming social security could share that information since now there’s a new taxable citizen. The IRS could easily prepare tax amounts assuming married filing jointly, married filing separately, and single. You would just choose one. And like it currently is, if both people attempt to claim dependency, someone gets slapped with a fine.
Tax law is absolutely complicated, and I definitely won’t deny that, but the IRS can make things easier and could do the basic filings.
They don't share that information unless absolutely necessary. All government agencies hold their cards pretty close to themselves for legal and liability reasons. The IRS will complain that you've both claimed a dependent because you have to include that dependent's information and they can tell when you both try to claim the same one