Here’s a diagram showing all the Canadian tax software options, almost everything is made by a Canadian company except two of the most commonly used.
Please stop using turboTax and H&R Block, you’ll likely save quite a bit of money by switching to one of the Canadian owned options too. (H&R Block charges $49.98 for a typical couple, Studio Tax charges $17.50 for up to 10 returns). GenuTax is completely free to use.
Links to each of the Canadian options are available on ShopCanadianStuff.ca
The graphic is originally from ShopCanadianStuff.ca/blog
The fact that you have to pay a service to pay taxes in the US is insane.
Here in japan if you work full-time or part-time your company files for you and you just fill in 5-10 fields of some sheet and then you’re golden. The company is required to help you.
If you file your own taxes you go to the official tax website, follow their web form to input data, and then it generates a PDF. You then either use your mynumber to send the data and pay taxes online, or you go to the tax office (for about 30 minutes) and submit/pay there. It then let’s you save your data in a file so you can finish your taxes in 5 minutes every year from then on.
If you don’t have internet or a computer, you go to the tax office and go to their support desk that help you file on paper.
The tax software companies lobby the government to keep the tax system complicated so that people will pay for tax software
Neither in Canada nor in the US do you need to pay a service to file taxes. All you need to do is get the forms and fill them out. People use these services because the forms are very long with many things to figure out, most of which don’t apply to most people.
I dunno about the US but in Canada you can download the completed form at the end before submitting it to the tax agency. Using this completed form can show you what you need to fill out yourself next year, assuming your circumstances don’t change.
There are some free ones in Canada, but even the paid ones are cheap I paid $15 for a license, it gives you 20 filings. I did 4 people so less than $5 each and the speed vs paper forms is worth it. However I hear Canada is moving to the system where they may do the taxes for you and you sign it.