Taxes and tax forms unit overview | Teacher Resources | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy

Hello teachers. In this unit, we're going to cover taxes and tax forms. As I always say, a good place to start is to just go through the unit yourself to familiarize yourself with the content. This is a shorter than average unit; it only has three exercises and two lessons here, so it shouldn't take you too much time to go through it. But if you're really short on time, then maybe the videos plus just the exercises or, worst case, maybe just the unit test and the exercises, which shouldn't take you too long to go over.

Now, this is a really important unit. I wish someone had gone over this with me in more detail when I was your students' age. I think most people, even if they have a general idea about other things in finance and personal finance, and most students are probably familiar with some form of taxes they already pay. Usually, sales tax is the one that they're most familiar with, and they have some vague notion about income tax. But most of them are a little shocked the first time they get their first paycheck, and they see how much of it is taken by both taxes and other things. So I think that that's a really important thing for folks to realize here.

Above and beyond just the material in this unit, have discussions about this. Ask students to talk to their parents about how much they're paying, not just in income tax, which is in many cases the primary tax, but also things like property tax, which can also be very significant. Most young people don't even realize that that's a significant tax that a lot of families might have to pay if they own a home. So, as always, have a discussion about these.

Then the tax forms; I think this is useful for someone of any age. Most adults, I still get sometimes lost with all of the different IRS form numbers. By helping to make the content on this course, it helped refresh some of my own knowledge. The more familiarity that students have with how especially income taxes work and the different forms of reporting both expenses or income, and how they all fit together, the less likely that the students are going to be intimidated when they actually have to file taxes.

It's important for them to realize just even how the whole tax filing occurs. It was something that when I first had a job, I was always wondering, well, why isn't all of this stuff just automatically done? The fact that a lot of it gets taken out of my paycheck, but then when the new year comes, I have to file these—could be sometimes reasonably complicated forms. Based on that, the government decides whether I overpaid or underpaid my taxes, and then I'll either have to give more money or they'll give me a refund. This was not obvious to me even after I graduated from college, and I'm guessing isn't obvious to a lot of your students.

So the more you could talk through that, give personal examples from your own life, and encourage students to talk to their parents or other folks they know in their family who might be going through taxation in some form, the better.