[cr0sh]

> to provide some motivations to politicians to help simplify the tax code?

You speak of NJ, NY, taxes, "mistakes", fines, potential "audits" by the IRS, then wonder why politicians would want to simplify and improve something that many of them likely grift from or cheat on themselves, due to that same complexity...

...and one of the biggest of these tax cheats hails from NY, likely has had his now (on again, off again) lawyer, who used to be mayor of NYC and before that as a US AG - probably ran interference for his cheating and other scams.

But all of them - and plenty of others - benefit from the complexity and other issues, and don't want it any other way, unfortunately. No real good solutions to that.

[chrismeller]

Hey now, no pointing out that the government has an incentive to keep the system difficult and confusing because it gets them money!

That’s absolutely not acceptable in this thread (I tried)!

[mixmastamyk]

Tax code complexity and the mechanics of filing are orthogonal. Fixing both is not a requirement for fixing either separately, or an excuse for not doing it.