There are two kinds of problems with filling out tax forms:
One is understanding the meaning of inputs, like if they say “income of type X goes here, income of type Y goes there”, you need to know whether your income was of type X or Y.
Another is following the processing instructions, such as “line 20 is line 17 plus line 19, assuming that line 19 is not greater than $500 + 0.15 × line 18, in which case line 20 is zero”.
In Slovakia, we recently have an online system, where you enter the data, the processing instructions are automatically validated, if all validations are okay then you sign it with your password and it’s done; you receive a confirmation e-mail.
You need to understand the categories of income. “Income from employment” is one of them that most people will use, but if you are an entrepreneur, an artist, or have other sources of income, you need to do some research. But ultimately, it is: this type of income goes into this input field. (It gets more complicated if you have income from other countries where you also paid tax.) Then your deductible expenses, like health insurance, social insurance, kids, etc. Plus a few more details. But once you do this successfully with someone else’s advice, the next year you probably can do the same thing alone.
The online form is a 1:1 copy of the old paper form. It doesn’t do the calculations for you (although it has enough knowledge it could), but instead highlights the values that do not follow the rules. Slightly less convenient, but perhaps it makes you pay better attention, dunno. Then you attach scans of your tax reports from employer(s), birth certificates for kids, etc. That’s all.
The tax report from employer essentially contains four important numbers—gross income, health insurance paid, social insurance paid, tax advance paid—which you need to copy to corresponding fields in tax form; in case you had multiple jobs, you enter the sum of corresponding numbers from each employer.
If you only had one employer and no other source of income during the whole year, the employer is legally required to do this whole thing for you (but you have to explicitly ask them). Otherwise, it’s your task.
(If someone would be seriously interested in this, feel free to ask, I can show you how it works.)
There are two kinds of problems with filling out tax forms:
One is understanding the meaning of inputs, like if they say “income of type X goes here, income of type Y goes there”, you need to know whether your income was of type X or Y.
Another is following the processing instructions, such as “line 20 is line 17 plus line 19, assuming that line 19 is not greater than $500 + 0.15 × line 18, in which case line 20 is zero”.
In Slovakia, we recently have an online system, where you enter the data, the processing instructions are automatically validated, if all validations are okay then you sign it with your password and it’s done; you receive a confirmation e-mail.
You need to understand the categories of income. “Income from employment” is one of them that most people will use, but if you are an entrepreneur, an artist, or have other sources of income, you need to do some research. But ultimately, it is: this type of income goes into this input field. (It gets more complicated if you have income from other countries where you also paid tax.) Then your deductible expenses, like health insurance, social insurance, kids, etc. Plus a few more details. But once you do this successfully with someone else’s advice, the next year you probably can do the same thing alone.
The online form is a 1:1 copy of the old paper form. It doesn’t do the calculations for you (although it has enough knowledge it could), but instead highlights the values that do not follow the rules. Slightly less convenient, but perhaps it makes you pay better attention, dunno. Then you attach scans of your tax reports from employer(s), birth certificates for kids, etc. That’s all.
The tax report from employer essentially contains four important numbers—gross income, health insurance paid, social insurance paid, tax advance paid—which you need to copy to corresponding fields in tax form; in case you had multiple jobs, you enter the sum of corresponding numbers from each employer.
If you only had one employer and no other source of income during the whole year, the employer is legally required to do this whole thing for you (but you have to explicitly ask them). Otherwise, it’s your task.
(If someone would be seriously interested in this, feel free to ask, I can show you how it works.)