The Australian Taxation Office is a shining beacon of efficiency, kindness and common sense.
I bet that’s a sentence you never thought you’d read.
I’ve just finished filing my taxes in the United States for the first time and as such, I’m ready to shout my praise for the ATO from the rooftops.
Americans love to declare their nation the greatest country in the world.
And in some areas that’s probably true – their military is unparalleled, their national park system is extraordinary, they’ve led the world on space exploration and they make a mean apple pie.
But when it comes to matters of taxation, administration, banking and public service – America has a long, long way to go.
Want to transfer some cash to a friend for a baseball or theatre ticket – you can forget it if you don’t have a third-party app to act as an intermediary between banks.
And the all important Social Security card you hear so much about on American films and television – it’s a flimsy piece of credit card sized cardboard.
Even my old Blockbuster membership card was laminated and had a thicker card stock than this document so crucial to existing in this country.
Want to send a postcard to your Grandma? Just buy a Global Forever Stamp from the United States Postal Service – if you can find one.
That’s right, more often than not, the post office is out of stamps – the one staple you think it would consistently stock.
Meanwhile, after five visits to the DMV, I’m still yet to get a US identification card thanks to a complicated series of rules that even the staff are struggling to decipher.
But the most baffling piece of the US administrative puzzle is the tax system.
For most of us in Australia, tax is a problem that comes around once a year and we can largely forget about it the other 364 days a year.
In the US, it’s not quite that simple. And as a non-citizen, it’s even worse.
Instead of taxes being withheld by an employer, staff receive their entire gross wage and must calculate and set aside the correct amount for tax every time they get paid.
Then at quarterly intervals, they whip out their checkbooks, get a series of estimate vouchers from their accountant and send not one, but two tax payments via post – one to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and another to their respective state – in my case, the New York Department of Taxation and Finance.
Before I moved here, the last time I used a checkbook was when I signed up for a primary school Dollarmites account.
Then in January at tax time, returns are filed. Even with an accountant it’s a complicated months-long process and the final document was a whopping 110 pages long.
Even then, you’re still not done. Next is a trip to the IRS office to have documents verified – the alternative is to send off your original passport and birth certificates in the post for 14 weeks.
It’s by appointment only and forget booking online, the only way to get a timeslot is to wait on the phone for hours.
It’s almost enough to make you long for the myGov portal, Australia Post and the line at Main Roads.
Vanessa Marsh is News Corp Australia’s US Correspondent
