Spent 10 minutes with my SO, moving our shared deductions between us to see which distribution resulted in the lowest amount of taxes. Turns out that the tax authorities are pretty good at what they do, as the best distribution was what they’d already prefilled.
Despite having very different income, no matter how we moved the numbers, the numbers at the bottom didn’t change in a manner where the total would result in a higher refund.
So we both ended up filing our taxes with no changes to the prefilled values.
EDIT:
TIL that the Norwegian tax authorities appear to have an official youtube channel. There you can see an example in English how it’s done. Can’t wait for them to have a youtube reaction face thumbnail or a collab with MrBeast.
Prefilled? Amazing. Clearly a country not beholden to the billion dollar tax prep industry.
As a form of silent protest in USA I only fill out a 1040EZ. Its the most basic free file. I’m certain I’m missing out on tax incentives with my retirement investments but also not adding other earnings. My protest is, you have the information. Audit my ass of you want more. We’ll see how it works out.
Norway, by the way.
I get an SMS each year whenever my preliminary taxes are ready. I then log in and get presented with a form listing different sections relevant to me: loans, paychecks, any dependants, etc. Each section comes prefilled with all the numbers, so I just have to glance over to make sure they didn’t miss anything or any relevant deductions.
I can submit a correction if some of the numbers are wrong for some reason, or add any sections that they’ve missed.
The deductions in my OP were mostly about me and my SO having fours kids together. By default, deductions like this is split 50/50, so we tried moving the numbers to see if we managed to get a better total. Turned out the difference was neglible.