Heh. I think it is a perfectly respectable job 
I suppose the payments on account are annoying, but if you were PAYE you’d be paying your tax every month, not twice a year. At least that way you get to keep the money in your account and take advantage of the generous interest rates currently available at your local High St bank 
In the US, folks who aren’t on PAYE, or at least not fully, are expected to cough up every quarter; 4x per year instead of 2 like y’all do. Sounds like HMRC are right nice understanding folks compared to our lot.
Those who Self Assess in the UK pay one payment nine months into the tax year and another three months after it has ended. It’s not so bad, I don’t think. If your previous year’s liability was less than £1000 or if more than 80% of the current year’s liability will be covered by PAYE, you don’t have to make these payments at all.
Although the penalty is small enough that some people make an informed decision not to make quarterly payments.
Yeah. The details get deep quickly, but at the end of the day the interest rate on underpayment is completely reasonable and the penalties are tiny compared to typical US taxpayers’ fear of them.
Actual fresh example. I just did the 2016 taxes for somebody who’d had zero withholding and made zero estimated tax payments. The total tax owed was over $12,000. The penalty for prepaying zero of that over the last 15 months was $15. The interest was a bigger number but the penalty was derisory.
People are way more scared of the tax bogeyman than is justified.
Sweden.
You get a form through the post with all the numbers filled in. I check those numbers are right. That takes a few minutes at by bank’s website and in the payroll section of work’s website. You then can either hand that form in (signed), log in to the tax authority’s website to press a few buttons or send an SMS with a code that is on the form.
I always get some money back as I haven’t filled in the forms to get some of the deductions on a monthly basis. Taxation is the same as in the UK with PAYE, it is taken off the pay slip monthly.
The first ever time I had to do my taxes was after moving to Sweden. That was an adventure, I’d never had to do one of these things and then suddenly I was doing one in a foreign language.
The penalties in the UK can be significant. It’s £100 if you’re so much as a day late.
The ‘tax agent’ industry in Aus was created by the ‘new simplified tax form’ in the 80’s. Prior to that, the tax form was 1 piece of paper, about double the size of American ‘letter’ paper.
Thankfully, the system was computerized a number of years ago, and most stuff is pre-entered, so few people have to even bother with the paper form. The 15 minutes it takes me is finding and entering my tax file number, figuring out the web site, and checking that the numbers are correct. But I’m a wage slave.