So you start with the supposition that the poorest households have $21 in interest income each year.
The current savings account rate for Chase Bank (an easy example of a national bank) is 0.01%, which means you’d need to have approximately $210,000 in a savings account to earn that much interest in a year.
What would you say is the threshold for living in poverty?
Planet Money has discussed this a few times. This is by design- rich people have complicated financial lives and auditing them takes a lot of resources. Thus the IRS is aggressively defunded by the wealthy in power so such resources will not exist to come after them. It’s working.
I suspect this as well. Poor people are much easier to audit, so it may be a quotas and numbers situation.
Oh it’s worse than that. Americans who don’t even live or work in the US still have to file taxes. Sometimes you even have to pay taxes on income earned in other countries no matter how long you have lived abroad. Even if you don’t, it still costs $2000-$3000 a year to pay an accountant to do the complicated expat paperwork to say “this person owes no money to the IRS”. No other country does this AFAIK. Land of the free, indeed.
That is why I declined US citizenship when I moved back to Canada. Even getting rid of US citizenship is expensive now. It’s like a cancer that follows you around the world.
Just to give a bit more detail*
I’m low-income, and I e-file my tax returns for free using online tax software, through the IRS Free File program.
There are eight different companies offering IRS Free File packages. Their income thresholds vary, and not all of them go up to $73,000 Adjusted Gross Income for Free File.
(E.g.: Some offer free filing only up to around $40,000 AGI, or only up to $65,000 AGI, etc.)
(E.g.: The one I used this year is free up to $73,000 AGI but has a bottom threshold of $16,000 AGI.)
(E.g.: Some, but not all, offer a free State tax return too.)
Be sure to START FROM THE IRS FREE-FILE WEBPAGE and click through from there to the tax prep company you desire to use. https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free
You can use the free Look-up Tool on the IRS website to see which of the IRS Free File providers you qualify for. Then, be sure to check out each of those providers to see if they include your state, fit your financial situation (i.e., do they support the various forms you need to fill out—depending on the types/sources of your income, etc.), etc. https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/general/
*(I know this is off-topic from audits, but I’m posting it here since we’ve also been discussing who can file for free, and there will be people who’ll want to know this.)
The specifics don’t matter–I was simply giving an example of a simple error that people do make and which will cause an “audit”. It could be the same error with one’s income. We’re humans, we sometimes transpose digits.
Obligs:
Unfortunately there are also some people who just don’t want to know.
But you did good anyway 
You can file online for free.
You can just upload your W2 and it gets imported.
Maybe the third time is the charm…
Jinx to all who came before me!
I should have completed reading the thread before replying.
Since the signal does not seem to be getting through, it doesn’t hurt to keep resending it…
Well, but you were also claiming:
And:
The last one, at least, has been quite thoroughly disproved…it would seem a humble, “oops, I got that wrong,” might be in order.
I am grateful for learning about parallelograms too though.
“Among the lucky one in nine callers who was able to reach a CSR,” Collins wrote, “hold times averaged 23 minutes.” But that was an average; many callers spent much longer on hold.
While using their Obamaphone, in which they can find fuck all for places to keep it charged.
And the GQP always makes a big show of saying how they will (even further) cut funding for IRS.
Again, the GQP having a policy that favors the wealthy, penalizes the non-wealthy, and the non-wealthy again docilely carries the wealthy’s water, thinking they’ll get to drink it.
(And, really, the GQP shouldn’t go too crazy with this because the rich GQP needs a compliant poor to pay all their taxes to fund the rich GQP. But, being the childish “id” of America, they can’t help themselves!)
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The shame is that it takes years or generations to build up an established culture of being even moderately compliant in filing/paying taxes. When you destroy that, it takes years/generations to build it back.
Look at Greece: where the piecemeal corruption allows everyone to cheat because everyone believes everyone else is cheating. You cannot change that overnight.
What happened to showing up at the tax office in person for assistance?
Can confirm.
Thank goodness, not recently.
Reason? See below.
Some of us, while not poor, are by no means rich, and have had to engage accountants long-term, as a means of self-defense and at considerable financial (and personal) sacrifice.
@Melizmatic
The older I get, the more I love Edna Mode. Any day I see her, it’s a good day. Thanks for this.
covid, most likely. Who knows when the irs will return to a semblance of “normal.”
This became at least unwritten policy many years ago on the theory that the rich can afford lawyers to fight the auditors, the poor can be pretty easily cowed into just handing over any money they may have. Add in the right wing attitude that if the poor have any money, it must be ill-gotten and therefore should be confiscated, and you have a perfect storm.
