Tax argh

[sauergeek]

https://mass.gov/dor (which expands to https://www.mass.gov/orgs/massachusetts-department-of-revenue) has a nice large link which says "Log in to DOR's web-based application for filing and paying taxes.".

When I log in by chasing that link, I can find no actual web-based application for filing my state income tax. I can see previous income tax returns I've filed, but there's nowhere to generate a new one. Thanks for the 30 minutes of frustration, guys! Guess I'm printing out a PDF again...

Even worse, MA had an online filing system for several years, but dropped it in 2017. I'm going to blame that one on Gov. Baker unless someone can point me at some other culprit.

Comments

[rix_scaedu]

State income tax?

*Blink*

We obviously have very different arrangements between the Commonwealth and the States regarding revenue raising over here....

[sauergeek]

I don't know Australia's arrangements of how the states (and, as I suspect they're different, territories) govern vs. the nation as a whole. The US became a country out of 13 separate British colonies, all of which had long-standing governments. The colonies, after the US Revolution, considered themselves 13 independent nations[1].

They treated themselves like 13 independent nations for not long at all. One, there was a war on, and two, it seemed a good idea from the start to have a parent government over them. The first attempt was the Articles of Confederation, which had a host of problems, the most blatant of which were fixed (and some new ones brought in) by the current parent government under the Constitution. In both cases, the state governments gave up a limited amount of power to a parent government, but kept a great deal to themselves[2]. There was a significant distrust of centralized power at the time. Some proposed forms of the parent government were rejected as being too much like the British parliamentary system.

For specifics of taxation, US states — and in some cases, sub-state entities, like counties or cities — can have their own income tax in addition to the federal income taxes. A fair bit of the money collected in federal income taxes goes right back to the states, but not in proportion to the amount paid in[3].

There is no federal sales/VAT tax. States can, and many do, have state sales taxes. All vary on what is taxed and how much the tax is. This has led to online sales from out of state not being taxed on the (likely bogus) theory that it's too hard to keep track of all the different sales taxes across the nation, with the result of a great deal of state sales tax revenue being lost[4].

There is no federal property tax. Property taxes are usually imposed by the local government entity, sometimes with constraints imposed by the state.

States are explicitly prohibited from imposing any sort of tariff on interstate goods. (Tariffs on interstate trade was a major problem under the Articles of Confederation.) They also can't regulate international trade. Regulation of trade is one of the few things, and by far the broadest, given exclusively to the federal government.

How does it work there?

[1] The Declaration of Independence uses the phrase "Free and Independent States" twice toward the end, never mind they were making the declaration together.

[2] Enough of them were sufficiently paranoid about it that two of the Constitutional amendments that make up our Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments) deal with it. Amendment 9 is "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."; amendment 10 is "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.". We still argue about what both of those mean today.

[3] This WalletHub analysis is much like others I've seen. For proportions, see a 2014 Atlantic article covering collections and expenditures. States with lower incomes or lower population densities tend to get more federal aid. These also tend to be the more conservative states, but that's not always true. (New Mexico, for example, tends more liberal, and gets a lot of federal aid; Wyoming tends more conservative and gets much less.)

[4] There's a case before the Supreme Court, South Dakota v. Wayfair, that's addressing the issue. There will, of course, be a lot of screaming if the decision in that case says that states can tax online sales.

[mathhobbit]

At my workplace, three Ph.D.s spent a significant amount of time distracted by the question of how to file for an extension in MA. Multiply that by many, and you're not doing good things for our workers' productivity.

[sauergeek]

I sent email to the DoR asking about their supposed web app, and got back a message saying "there isn't one". Thanks, guys! Want to stop advertising like there is?