10 Facts About Tax Day
Although the topic is about the Tax Day but I will discuss here other general facts about tax also. Doctors earn income by getting fee from patients, engineers work on construction sites and get paid for that and lawyers charge their clients a handsome amount of money as fee. What is the source of income of the governments? Yes, it our money (taxes) which keeps the machinery of the government functioning efficiently. As a responsible citizen, we should pay taxes for the betterment of our respective countries and to enable the government to focus on developmental activities. 15th of April is termed as the Tax day but if it falls on a weekend then the date is shifted on to the next business day. Let us now read some interesting facts about tax.
10. The excitement and thrill of completing the task on the last day is no doubt great. Millions of Americans follow this philosophy and they tend to file the tax returns on 15th April. There is a huge line-up at the post offices and people have to wait for very long in the line. Thanks to the officials of the respective post offices, they provide the tax payers with refreshments at regular intervals. Thumbs up!
9. Wars cannot be fought without money. The first USA tax was implemented in the year 1861 to fund the ongoing Civil war. At that time, tax was three per cent of the income over $800 but later on it was changed before the World War l in 1913 and that is the system which is prevalent even today.
8. Albert Einstein — the name sounds familiar, isn’t it? Yes, he is the man known to be the smartest who ever lived on earth. Now, let us listen to one of the remarks of this great personality “he hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
7. Do you know how much time is consumed in preparing the tax return by the Americans? You don’t need to put your brain to compute this as this is a very heavy time investment. On average, about 312 million Americans spend a total of 7.6 billion hours every year to prepare their respective tax returns.
6. The world’s highest corporate income tax is paid in New York. According to Forbes, the figure was round about 46.2%. Illinois follows New York in this race with a figure of 42.3%.
5. What if I tell you that an entity paid no tax at all even though it earned $10.3 billion. Yes, it was possible because of a set-off of the profits with the losses of the other division of the same entity. Are you curious about knowing that entity? It was General Electric Company which is an American multinational conglomerate company.
4. I didn’t joke about the complexity of the tax preparation when I referred to Albert Einstein in my earlier point. The fact that even the head of IRS, Douglas Shulman, gets his tax return prepared by a tax professional is conspicuous of the complexity of tax returns.
3. If you are thinking of evading tax for this year then you better ensure that your neighbor is on your side. I am saying this thing on a serious note as there is a big monetary reward by IRS for any person who acts as a whistleblower to uncover any tax evader.
2. There was a survey done by IRS in 2008. The survey was to know the opinion of the people about the payment of taxes. It is very heartening to see that about 89% of them replied in affirmative that there should be no cheating in the payment of tax on due date.
1. However, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed The Social Security Act and made it a law in the year 1935 but these social security numbers were not used in the tax return form until 1961.
