I’m quite a bit different than my business-owning peers — I actually don’t mind paying taxes. I get a lot of benefit from those taxes: providing for our common defense, local police and fire protection, and a pretty great infrastructure (by world standards), among many other services that our governments provide. It is my duty as a citizen to financially support the governments that protect and enable our freedoms.
I feel this way even though those services and those governments should be much more efficient and much less bureaucratic than they are. So I’m not a typical all-taxes-are-evil type of business owner…
But I hate dealing with taxes.
When I bought this business, I knew that I was going to have to deal more with taxes and payroll issues than when I was an individual employee of a corporation. (Unlike many businesses, we don’t send our payroll or most of our taxes out to other professionals. Yet.)
But I totally underestimated the crushing administrative burden of the variety, frequency, and complexity of tax payments. Besides dealing with federal, state, and local governments (which I expected), I quickly learned that each entity had many different types of taxes, each with different weekly, monthly, and quarterly schedules, and each out-of-sync with the others. There were many taxes which we paid and documented on a regular basis which had to be re-documented periodically. Then, in January, the schedule gets jumbled from every other tax period. It is needlessly complicated and time-consuming.
Again, I’m a willing taxpayer (although I’d always welcome paying less). But I don’t want to be a tax expert. And I don’t want to be forced to hire one. And I don’t want to spend so much time managing our taxes when it should be spent managing our business…
There must be a simpler way for businesses to contribute to their governments.