(Written with help from O.M.)

I'm wondering, where do you(/does her) start with this?

You start by evaluating your situation. Do you have taxable income beyond your w2s? Do you have enough deductions to make itemizing worthwhile? Do you have children and make some, but not a lot, of money? Are you easily intimidated by long instructions? If the answers are all no, then grab a copy of the year 2024 1040 and look it over - they are grouped into sections, and the most important ones to look over now are income, taxes and credits, and payments. If at least half of it makes sense and it doesn’t make your head spin just trying to read it, download the 1040 instructions pdf and read the line by line instructions. Most of it won’t apply to you, but you need to at least read each line’s instructions well enough to feel confident about that.

If you have questions use google (with the usual caveats about checking your source). And don’t be afraid to ask people for help. ☺️. Finally, if after all that you aren’t confident - don’t. Stick with your usual method of filing, but when you’re done, really look it over. See if that gives you any insight to your questions, and try again next year.

By the way, you can still do this even if you have a more complicated tax situation, and a lot of 1099 income isn’t much harder to file than w2 income. But it does get more complicated the further away from basic w2 you get. As for itemized deductions….

Is the result something you can feel confident that you won't be audited for?

Well, on a personal note yes. But my confidence comes from having helped a close friend who had let things get so out of hand she was actually getting her wages garnished by the IRS. Not only did I help her get them to stop with the wage garnishment, we got those wages refunded back to her - with interest at that (it took a while). I’m not an accountant or a tax professional but I enjoy rule lawyering and it turns out they have a similar skill set 😂

But putting personal confidence aside, it’s a complicated question, but mostly because people tend to misunderstand how IRS audits end up working for most people. First off, realize that in most cases the IRS already has all the information you are sending them - you are simply supposed to add any information that they do not have. If you don’t provide anything novel in your filing then all they are really doing is checking your math. And they consider most w2 filers to be “unsophisticated tax filers” - if the only errors in your tax filing amount to math errors or other obvious flubs, they just fix the error, notify you and send you a check/bill depending. 🤦‍♀️but also NBD.

On the other hand, if you fail to report income they know you have, or you claim unusual or questionable expenses/deductions, that is more likely to get you an actual audit. This is a serious oversimplification but it helps here if you think about audits in terms of burdens of proof. If your taxes are in dispute, the IRS holds the burden of proof for your income, but you hold the burden of proof for your expenses and deductions. Thanks to robust reporting requirements they generally know about above-board income with any businesses, and failure to file for that income can result in the “unfriendly” version of what I described above - basically, a letter with corrected taxes and a demand for payment with interest. Or it can trigger a full audit. It’s much the same with expenses, except you have to be able to justify every expense and deduction you took. So if in doubt, consult with someone, or don’t take the expense deduction.

That said, penalties and interest are based on the taxes you should have paid. If the IRS finds a $10 error in your taxes they will send you a bill but it’s just not going to be that big. If you are reporting all of the income you are aware of and not claiming a ton of bad deductions there just isn’t that much potential tax to underpay. 🤷‍♀️

Oh, and that close friend with the messed up taxes? A well known national tax prep firm did her taxes the years that caused the problems. But since they werent simple w2 taxes hers were excluded from their guarantee. 🤬

tl;dr: If you only have w2 and/or 1099 income with no expenses and you have basic math and logic skills you’re probably pretty safe doing your own taxes - you will probably just get it right and any mistakes you make are unlikely to be tragic.