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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

You do not go to prison. This is a lie the tax prep lobby wants you to perpetuate. The IRS sends you a letter letting you know what you did wrong. If you agree, you either pay them the difference or cash the check they sent you. If you disagree, you file a dispute and there's a whole system for handling that.

Yes, it's stupid that we do it this way, but there's no need to propagate the tax prep lobby's fear mongering.

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Glad to see I wasn't the only one taking issue with that claim.

It is frustrating, as I understand why it is stressful to get a call from the IRS. For the vast majority of reasons you will get that call, it really should not be, though.

And agreed that it is silly we do things this way. It is equally silly that we have built up most people to think they are supposed to have an adversarial relationship with the IRS.

I think that's true in most cases for usual good faith errors. But(!) if you're not filing, or making an egregious error, thinking you're being clever and evading taxes, or keeping accounts below reporting thresholds on purpose, you can get investigated and potentially go to prison, so the threat is there in certain circumstances.

That's not the situation described in the post I was responding to, and I don't think it applies to most tax filers.

The "situation" was a meme about filing taxes in its broadest possible conception. I don't agree that there's a distinction to be drawn here, and I already explicitly noted that this doesn't apply to most filers.

I guess you could include intentional fraud under the phrase, "What if I get it wrong?" but that seems pretty far outside the intent of the question.

I don't agree that it's far outside their intent of the question. I actually think it was pretty close to the heart of it, which is an idea of complying with the bizarre way in which the United States has decided to process taxes.

The truth is you can, in fact, go to prison, and that it is indeed rare for that to happen, but it can happen and I acknowledged its rarity.

Even "no filing" won't get you in prison if you were not aware that you weren't filing. Happened to me once for state taxes, specifically. A lot of us were remote and didn't realize the company we were working for had messed up and not reported anyone's income to the state.

That said, yes, if you are attempting active fraud, then you are doing more than just making mistakes on your taxes.

You pay the difference plus interest! But yes 100% agree. That's how I learned you need to pay estimated taxes ;-)

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