[fn-mote]

I don't understand how these could be issues. They aren't in my country.

You're still responsible.

Tell each company how much to withhold.

If they take too much, you get it back when you file taxes.

If they don't take enough, you pay a penalty for having too large of a bill when you file.

The issues you mention exist regardless of how many employers you have, because you can have income that does not come from an employer (e.g. stock dividends).

[vel0city]

This sounds the same as the US then. If you have more than one income source or you're planning on taking something other than the standard deduction you need to tell your income sources to change withholdings. If they take too much, you get it back when you file taxes.

What's the big difference? You don't need a tax preparer to do your taxes in the US, and if all you have is a normal W-2 income and a bit of bank interest its a pretty simple couple of forms to file.

[Delk]

It's hard to tell if there's much of a difference or not since I don't really know the US system (and I'm, in all likelihood, from yet another country different than GP).

The simplest cases, however, don't really require filing forms at all. The withholding process sounds similar, and when the time for filing taxes comes, you get a pre-filled return sheet with withheld taxes and your pre-calculated actual tax based on the information the tax office has.

Employers directly report income to the tax office, so that information is already included. Banks also automatically withhold taxes on the interest they pay and report it to the tax office. I think banks and broker companies usually report sales of stocks etc. made through them as well.

The same pre-filled return sheet includes national and local income taxes that have been automatically calculated based on your place of residence. (I assume this is more complex in the US due to different state legislations; here the tax legislation is the same everywhere even though local tax rates vary.)

If you don't want to add deductions (in addition to standard ones) and you don't have any corrections to make, you don't need to file any forms. The only things you need to do are to pay the difference if you owe something or to report your account number for a refund if they don't have it already. Otherwise filing in a simple case is a no-op.

If you do want to file for deductions or make corrections, you can do that with an online form.

And of course you still do want to check that the pre-calculated information is correct and whether there are any non-automatic deductions for which you're eligible.

More complex cases are, well, more complex. If you've got income from renting an apartment, for example, you do need to report that information yourself. But it's still a relatively simple online form.

Real estate tax is handled separately from income tax. You get sent a bill with a pre-calculated sum based on property registered in your name. If you have no corrections to make, you just pay the bill.

In contrast, I think even small businesses commonly hire accountants since for them the process is probably more complex with all the deductibles etc.

If the simple cases are similarly simple in the US and making corrections is a relatively straightforward form away, I wonder why there always seems to be such a big fuss in the US about filing taxes. Because of state/local differences in tax code? Just overall complex legislation? Or maybe it's just more common to have income from a variety of sources so more people need to deal with the more complex cases? Is the filing process paper-only and the only way to do simple online filing with automatic calculation to go through commercial tax-filing software?