in germany filling taxes took me about 5min.. that really because you need to go get a paper and give it to your company. Its otherwise more like 0 minutes since theres barely anything to do (which is.. logical, as its pointed out, they already have the data).
in the US, after hours and hours of reading and trying to do it myself, its still hell. using turbotax means its going to take 30min instead of a month; all that for "$30 a year" or close to that.
I assume that what you meant by that is merely doing what is required for your employer to withhold taxes from your salary.
The (for most employees optional) Einkommensteuererklärung might be doable in 5 minutes if you know it like the back of your hand, have all necessary data immediately available and no special cases apply to you at all.
Otherwise, if you use the Germany equivalent of TurboTax, merely reading and answering "no" to all the questions that determine whether any special cases apply to you would take longer than 5 minutes.
10 or 15 minutes?? Maybe if only one or two special cases apply to you, you know exactly in advance what you're going to do and have everything ready, but that's not a realistic scenario. Several hours of looking for documents and trying to understand what exactly you need, then probably waiting for days or weeks for some third-party documents to arrive, that's my experience.
And the large number and high fees of tax advisors in Germany would seem to support my view rather more than yours.
well, now you get a better perspective of how bad the US ones are I guess, because it didnt take me much longer when i lived in germany (for many years) past the first year / reading how it works. sure maybe i could have saved 20eur more, but not anything sensible.
you guys have it good in comparison, you just dont realize how bad it is elsewhere.
in germany filling taxes took me about 5min.. that really because you need to go get a paper and give it to your company. Its otherwise more like 0 minutes since theres barely anything to do (which is.. logical, as its pointed out, they already have the data).
in the US, after hours and hours of reading and trying to do it myself, its still hell. using turbotax means its going to take 30min instead of a month; all that for "$30 a year" or close to that.
That's certainly fucked up.