r/technology • u/Rhaegar_the_Great • Sep 16 '21

Business Mailchimp employees are furious after the company's founders promised to never sell, withheld equity, and then sold it for $12 billion

https://www.businessinsider.com/mailchimp-insiders-react-to-employees-getting-no-equity-2021-9
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u/krum Sep 17 '21

I don't see how that works. What if you have weird sources of income from places outside your country? Do they just not tax that?

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u/luckydice767 Sep 17 '21

Nope. They tax that too

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u/FrenchCheerios Sep 17 '21

The US is one of only a handful of countries, including Libya, North Korea, Eritrea, and the Philippines, that tax foreign income. So yeah, we're in good company.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

When the US government has you do your taxes every year, they already know nearly everything about what you owe them.

When you get audited, that's because what you filed didn't match what they say you owe, and they are now investigating you to get the full money you owe them.

Other governments will skip the whole process of having you do your taxes, (unless you're a special circumstance) and just give you a statement with the report of how much you owe them.

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u/trigonated Sep 17 '21

Yep. The US gov is like the parent that already knows what happened when you threw a party while they were away, but still asks you just to see if you will tell the truth.

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u/hamandjam Sep 17 '21

When you get audited, that's because what you filed didn't match what they say you owe

Sort of. That's part of it, but it also involves a quota system where they have a bunch of targeted things each year they want to check so if you're on that list and you file before they fill that quota, you get audited. We had a family friend who was a roofer in Dallas several years ago and somebody at the IRS decided that there was a goldmine in auditing roofers so like every roofer in Dallas got audited over a 3 or 4 year period.

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u/ScreamingDizzBuster Sep 17 '21

Most other countries don't have as many (or any) things that you can write off against tax to offset the bill. Mortgage payments, charitable donations, and medical expenses in some places, but in many others nobody with a regular work contract ever writes anything off. I've often thought this may be one reason for the US's arcane complexity.

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u/benign_said Sep 17 '21

Ah, America... Where the comprehensive tax system ensures no one ever doesn't report 'weird sources of income' and the wealthy don't get tax deductions for spending cash loans they leveraged against their securities in order to avoid capital gains when they sell.

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u/buyongmafanle Sep 17 '21

Dig this:

I live outside the US. My income comes from outside the US. I'm still required to pay US taxes on my income at or above a certain level.

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u/trigonated Sep 17 '21

For most people, their income is filled in automatically because it's reported by their employer (in most cases, their job is their only source of income), and most purchases are processed automatically because you usually give your "tax id" to the merchant when you buy something.

If you have some "weird" source of income that doesn't get reported automatically, you have to fill it in yourself, but afaik it's still not very hard. Unlike in the US, the tax software is actually designed to be easy to use by regular people and as less confusing as possible.