File your taxes online for free and get paid to do it?

Or that is certainly the impression that the US Government seems to be giving to me.

There seems to be a big push for e-filing -something that the uk has had for 3 or 4 years. However, in order to file with the US Govt you need to have earnt less than $50,000 in your adjusted gross income (which is easy to do if you follow H&R Block’s advise to me – put $0 in the field). As that was the case for me last year I went through taxcut’s free online service and filled in all the data that I had carefully worked out with H&R Block’s software. I didn’t really want to use H&R as their software was giving me rubbish information and I had been told by H&R to a) change my AGI to be $0, b) that as this was my first year filing taxes I should pay someone to do it, c) that their software didn’t cover foreign earned income and d) that I needed to upgrade (despite that I had filled in the foreign earned income forms with their software). As they do a 100% satisfaction guarantee I was going to claim my money back (and probably still will).

Anyway, I decided to use the free e-filing from the IRS and that led me to the turbotax website. I filled in all the information and then when it came to e-file it said that they were going to charge me a $16 preperation fee – so yep, the e-filing is free but they charge you $16 AFTER you have filled all your information in – swines. So I went back to H&R and filed my data that way and got a response back from the IRS accepting my filing.

Filing my state taxes is more complicated as you have to register with the State first – in order to do this you have to fax your Social Security Card and your drivers licence (I hope EVERYONE in the US drives), your date of birth and a daytime contact number to 206 600 6113 and you will get a response within 24 hours. Ignore the Ohio Dept of Taxation website that says to call to initiate this process as that is what they tell you to do – AFTER you have spent about 30 minutes on hold – if you are lucky enough to get into the queue.

The other reason you get paid to fill in your taxes is that if you have any problems, H&R and ODOT seem to expect you to call them during office hours – so whilst you are sitting at your office computer (and your tax information is presumably at home!), getting paid to do your real work – they seem to expect you to call them and sit in a queue for ages whilst you get some (not very helpful) advice.

So after all that I think I am going to probably do my state taxes via the postal system, and after I have sent that off I will have done my first year of taxes AND get a 100% refund of the taxes I paid last year (due to only working a few months in the US). Sadly this is going to be the only year that ever happens.