[cmpxchg]

It's not just Intuit and H&R Block. A lot of us small business owners don't want the IRS knowing every detail of our businesses in order to just magically send us a pre-filled return each year.

The current tax system places responsibility on you, the investor, to tabulate all of your gains and losses, but it also gives you the freedom to invest in complex and unusual transactions like coins in the first place. Don't be so quick to assume you could give up the one without giving up the other, were it not for those pesky TurboTax lobbyists.

[Analemma_]

> A lot of us small business owners don't want the IRS knowing every detail of our businesses in order to just magically send us a pre-filled return each year.

For the 99% of us who aren't small business owners, the IRS already has all our information: my W-2's, 1099's, etc. are already sent there by my employer/bank/broker. Making me do my tax returns anyway is literally useless, just busywork for its own sake.

> The current tax system places responsibility on you, the investor, to tabulate all of your gains and losses, but it also gives you the freedom to invest in complex and unusual transactions like coins in the first place.

As people have explained countless times, letting the IRS compute your returns for you in no way precludes the ability for you to do it yourself, if you desire. That is how it works in every other country - most people just accept the government's return, the people who have complex financials file their own. Stop making the rest of us do pointless work just because of your paranoia.

[s73v3r_]

You're saying that like they don't already know those details.

And your second paragraph makes no sense whatsoever.

[lovich]

That sounds like you're arguing that you want the ability to continue avoiding taxes by not letting the IRS know the whole truth. That's fine, but if I have to pick one entity to extract money from me id rather it go to the government which at least has a tiny chance of benefiting me rather than going to a private company who has no reason to do anything to benefit me

[deelowe]

Odd. The majority of the things I consider crucial to keeping my current standard of living comes from private entities.

That said, pretending the IRS doesn't already know what taxes to collect from you is definitely naive.

[lovich]

The majority of things I Co Sider crucial to keeping my current standard of living comes from private entities as well but that set of private entities is not the same as all private entities.

If my choices were to pay the tax man directly or pay a third party to calculate my tax for me because it's too complicated to do myself in part because of that third entities lobbying, then I am always going to choose to cut out the middle man

Also I agree the the IRS can figure out the taxes you'd need to pay if they ever cared to look at you, but I was responding to the parent comment implying that they shouldn't get more information so that they could go outside the regulations