[rym_]

In 2019 I filed my (Dutch) taxes on my phone, while I was on a bus somewhere in the north of Argentina after previously having traveled for 20 something hours. It took me about 15 minutes to check if the numbers from the government were correct (they were) and I was done. Americans are being duped by these predatory companies.

[GuB-42]

Same in France.

But I am going to play devil's advocate here, did you get the "best deal"?

It all comes down to deductibles. In France, the "one click taxes" option assumes 10% of your salary is deductible, which is often a good deal but sometimes, it may actually be more, especially if you have a long commute. The government app won't help you with that.

It may not help you with incentives too. For example, you may get some tax rebates if you did some work to improve the energy efficiency of your house, what exactly you can declare? And charities, loans, etc... A good accountant may help you save a significant amount with all these details.

Tax software are like a middle ground between simple, no brainer, government issued "one click" tax filling and hiring a professional accountant. Note that in France, most self-employed people hire an accountant, proper tax filling can be a minefield if you are not an employee.

And by the way, that's Intuit's argument. That it is used to justify its evil deeds is a thing, but the argument itself is not without merit.

[surge]

I believe the way it works here (US), is most people with the standard deduction works for probably 80-90% of cases because their finances aren't complex enough or they're not doing enough where the deductions exceed the standard. So most would be fine with government just telling you what you owe/they owe and you just signing off or making a correction.

If you're doing a lot of charity donations, real estate, student loan debt, saving receipts for work related expenses, calculating depreciation on assets, etc, then its worth it, but by then you probably have a personal accountant doing it for you, not a program.

[Moto7451]

Also factor in the removal of the State and Local Tax deduction. Prior to that I ended up writing off my CA taxes instead of taking the standard deduction.

I’ll save my personal political ranting for a different space.

Addressing the GP, yeah our system has been messed with by the tax prep companies. One year I had a complicated (for me) tax situation and I hired a CPA. They managed to make a mistake that lead me to overpaying by thousands. The IRS was nice enough to mail me a check.

The IRS clearly has enough info to run a European style system. We (as a country) just underfund the IRS and have special interest vested in maintaining the status quo. Clearly those special interests are doing a great job if someone with a state certification and professional tax software can mess up the math. A friend had the same issue with this past tax year and owes a balance plus penalties. She has every intention of paying her taxes. Why does our system make it hard for her to do so?

There’s no good reason why we should have to chance these situations. We should just be able to pay our taxes correctly at time we are paid and move on.

[GFischer]

It's not only Europe. I live in Uruguay and I got an SMS to check if my auto-filed taxes were correct, if I do I have the option to make changes right in the government website.

And the local IRS has the best paying software development jobs in the government, so they actually have decent software (although they could do with some more UX people).

[Izkata]

Also the standard deduction was recently significantly increased (I think it was doubled in 2017, can't remember for sure the exact the time/amount though), so it's a better deal for even more people.

[tinco]

I'm Dutch as well. A couple of years ago my university fees were made tax deductible, I'm hazy on the details but basically I dropped out of my masters degree to work on a startup. Normally if you finish your degree some of your costs are relieved by the government with some loan forgiveness scheme. After 5 years or so they decided I definitely wasn't finishing that degree and all my university costs were suddenly tax deductible.

Obviously I had no idea of this scheme, I have no accountant and my university fees of 5 years ago were far from my mind.

Randomly got €6000 euros income tax back, very nice windfall courtesy of the Netherlands government.

[EE84M3i]

That seems like a surprisingly large amount of money. I thought university wasn't that expensive there (enough that the deduction of the income saved 6000 euros on taxes). Did you mean it became a tax credit and you just got all the money you paid in fees back?

[tinco]

Yeah it was all of it for three years, education costs are 100% deductible, so if it was 3 years at 2000/yr (standard university rate back then) it would be 6000 total. I forgot the exact amount because in that same year I also bought a house and there's a bunch of tax deductibles there as well, I think I got back over 8000 in total that year.

Normally the final dues are a lot less, probably 0 for people who have no mutations and a regular job. I had to pay 300 euro this year because I did a single freelance gig on the side.

edit: Note that this is probably a very exceptional situation. Normally college students don't make enough money to be paying taxes in the first place, I had the perfect storm of having all the deductibles being applicable in a single year, and making a good wage that year. I'm just telling this story because it's an example of the system randomly giving me the sort of tax benefit even a dedicated accountant might have missed, just because it system applied its rules to all the information it has about me.

[EE84M3i]

In the US that's called a "tax credit". A "deduction" is something that reduces the amount of income used for tax calculations.

So I thought you meant you got 6000 back because your university fees became deductable. At 25% tax rate, that would be 24,000 in fees. It sounds like you got a tax credit.

[tinco]

Hmm, you're right. So there's one thing I didn't mention and that is that my income was abnormally high that year because I was bought out of the company I resigned from. Pushing me into the 50% tax rate territory. This might have made the deductibles that much more significant. I would have to look up the exact numbers to know for sure.

[benhurmarcel]

And yet all those deductions are possible in France. You make it sound like they'd be impossible to claim with that system.

[yunohn]

> did you get the "best deal"?

From my experience with the NL tax system, next to nothing is deductible. Very straightforward taxes, they take 51% of all personal income. ;)

[oliwarner]

AVG income tax in NL is 28%. It's progressively banded like most other countries. With complications for withheld income (pensions, etc).

[yunohn]

Could you source the average tax rate number? That’s only the base tax rate for all income above ~20k.

[oliwarner]

Honestly, it was a two-second Google for "nl average tax rate". I didn't look at it any deeper at the time but the source was https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-netherlands...

> In the Netherlands, the average single worker faced a net average tax rate of 28.7% in 2020, compared with the OECD average of 24.8%. In other words, in the Netherlands the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.3% of their gross wage, compared with the OECD average of 75.2%.

The specific number wasn't as important as pointing out that NL doesn't have a magically fixed number (and certainly not a high one) for income taxation.

[ninja3925]

If this figure is true, do you see the symbolism of it as I do? It's not 49%, where the individual will still work mostly for themselves but 51%, where the state owns the majority of the labor for each individual. I find this number chilling.

[tinco]

The figure is not true, it used to be 51% for income above a certain amount (I think 60000?) but now it's 49,50% for income above 68000. Even when it was 51%, you would have to make more than 500,000 for the total taxes to be exceed 50%.

Anyway, what's chilling about it? You're phrasing it in a very weird way, the state doesn't own labor. It is due taxes for its services rendered.

The Netherlands is ridiculously rich and the government takes very good care of its citizens. I think it's hard to imagine for Americans how much value we get from our government. Traveling from The Netherlands to the states. Even your richest cities have poor people hungry, suffering and distressed just camping around everywhere. I'm not saying we've got it perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the deal we got.

[yunohn]

The 500k figure is quite misleading. Sure that’s for 51%, but anything over 100k, it already exceeds 40%. That’s still a huge number.

There are tons of poor and hungry people in NL, and the gov is actively hostile to homelessness. There’s lots of municipal corruption, and central inefficiency. I know lots of Dutch citizens who are in student debt, and very few families who can afford to buy a home before 35.

It’s a fallacy that somehow this is the /the/ tax rate that can provide for citizens. There is no magic number, and we can always demand more efficiency.

[tinco]

To me it's simple. My tax as someone trying to get a startup to work is about 30%, it would be 22% in the US. That means I pay 8% extra to be largely abstracted from the harsh reality of the suffering of the unlucky and disadvantaged.

Check this video out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKo8Sv99MkM That's about Skid Row, it's how one of the US's richest cities deals with the disadvantaged.

Dutch citizens with student debt.. that's a joke right?

[pksebben]

> very few families who can afford to buy a home before 35

So, imagine knowing very few families who can afford to buy a home. Like, at all. So long as we're still comparing the Netherlands and the US, I don't think there's much of a contest.

That said, the central thrust of your comment holds true; always room for improvement.

[Hokusai]

> where the state owns the majority of the labor for each individual

I guess that it all depends what do you get back. To live in a well functioning society is worth a kingdom.

In many places your landlord owns more than half of your income, that could be more worrisome. At least I can vote for my representants in the government.

Finally, I pay over 50% on part of my salary in Sweden, with what I have left I have an awesome live and extra to save, so I will not complain.

[yunohn]

> In many places your landlord owns more than half of your income

My understanding of rent in both Sweden and the Netherlands, is that of any EU capital: easily 30-50% of your monthly income goes to landlords.

Could you clarify your view on this?

[Hokusai]

Meanwhile other markets were heavenly corrected around 2009-2015 after the housing crush Sweden came out quite unscratched. Low interest rates also have created an incentive to invest in housing for the average citizen. On the other side construction companies in Sweden are quite shy to build new housing as investment goes to other more profitable industries, Sweden is below EU average in construction. Finally Sweden population have grown more than the EU average.

So, the swedish housing availability is insufficient and prices reflect that. It is an imbalance that is difficult to solve short term. And probably also overpriced as the interest rates are low and predicted to be low.

[laurencerowe]

Marginal tax rates in California also reach this level. Health insurance is not included.

[brezelnbitte]

The reason your taxes are simpler though is because the Dutch government doesn’t use the tax system to implement policy like the US does. The US Congress uses the tax system to influence social policy as well as to deliver benefits for specific groups and industries. And over time all of these legislative additions have turned a simple revenue raising system into a complex mess of deductions and credits.

Now I am not defending turbo tax’s predatory actions in the past but it’s not complicating the tax system just taking advantage of it being complicated.

[mjburgess]

To add to this even further:

In europe we just directly regulate behaviour either by directly taxing it or making it illegal.

In the US they set tax levels much higher and then offer breaks as incentives.

The latter has the philosophical virtue of making behaviour "expensive but not illegal" (ie., in europe you cannot legally avoid the tax).

However it dramatically complicates government and makes US citizens dramatically "overtaxed" absent these breaks. What we in europe often miss is that the US anti-tax lobby is reacting to a very different tax environment that is, on paper, very extreme.

[azemetre]

Aren't like >70% of the populations taxes extremely simple tho? Most people are just taking the standard deduction and not much else.

Most of the complications in tax policy are affecting a small minority of people and corporations.

[aksss]

Yeah if you work a W-2 job and the company is making tax deductions from your paycheck, your taxes are pretty simple. If you have a mortgage, you can deduct the interest. I think most people are in this category. Taxes just start getting complicated proportionate to the creative compensation some jobs offer - deferred stock purchase programs, etc., - or if you have some complicated deduction or third-party income sources.

[TheCoelacanth]

> If you have a mortgage, you can deduct the interest. I think most people are in this category

That's true, but you need to have other deductions or a fairly large mortgage for it to be worth taking that deduction instead of the standard deduction. Most people are better off with the standard deduction.

[aksss]

This is true, especially after the standard deduction nearly doubled for most in 2017.

[guerrilla]

Sweden uses tax policy to influence things and our taxes are just as easy. The state knows most stuff and then we just go in and adjust the default.

So, no, the reason is that they have all the information already and for most people just need you to verify it. In the US, the tax companies are lobbying the government to keep it difficult. The subject has been covered on HN every year during tax season.

[specialist]

What does neutral social policy taxation look like? Which countries should the USA emulate?

[onion2k]

Here in the UK I don't need to file taxes at all as an employee.

[consp]

You employer doesn't know your deductibles in the Netherlands due to privacy concerns (and other rules as well), which you definitely want to file in most cases since you pay less money or get some back. You are also responsible for your taxes, if the employer screws up you should check it. This is probably different from the UK. It is not a "can't do" but more or less a "won't do".

edit: so it's not that different, just a different method of doing so. Good to know.

[pmyteh]

You tell the tax office of any unusual deductibles, and they give your employers a 'tax code' which tells them how much allowance to give you (but critically not why, to better protect your privacy).

Even this isn't needed in most cases; things are either done employer side (paid from pre-tax income, like pensions) or directly by the government (basic rate tax is semi-automatically added to charitable donations, so only higher rate taxpayers need to declare it, and they all fill in a short return anyway).

[maccard]

Your employer doesn't need to know what your deductibles are (also the deductibles are much more limited here). If you, for example, make a large one off pension contribution, HMRC will adjust your tax code, which your employer will just apply to your payroll.

[wdb]

I wouldn't know what I would be able to get tax relief for as an employee. What kind of deductibles?

Guess, I could claim that £6 per week for Covid work from home stuff. Wish you could claim the cost of repairing your bike, or public transport costs.

[maccard]

Most of the big ones can be done without a self assessment. If you make a pension contribution for example, you can call hmrc and tell them and they'll adjust your tax code

[RHSeeger]

Doesn't that more or less equate to doing your taxes, just in little updates for each thing, rather than one big update at the end of the year?

[maccard]

Not at all. The list of things you can claim for is very limited, and the majority of them are automatically applied. Having to actually contact HMRC is a rarity. If you are salaried employee with no extra cash coming in, you don't need to do anything.

Another example of how the system works - if you are working two jobs, both as a regular employee, HRMC will instruct your employer as to what your tax deduction should be for that paycheck to make sure that things are balanced. For <some large number>% of people, this will be correct, and if it's not, it will rectify itself over 2 or 3 pay periods. If that's _still_ not enough, a phone call to HMRC (usually taking less than 10 minuts for the two times in a decade I've had to do it) will resolve the issue in your next check.

[ZeroGravitas]

You can claim those, if you use the transport as part of your work but notably not for travelling to and from work, 20p per mile for the bike.

[ridiculous_fish]

Charitable contributions? How are those treated?

[billpg]

If I want to give (say) £100 to a charity, I give £75 and sign something agreeing to allow the charity to get the rest from the income taxes I already paid.

(I forget the exact percentage.)

[joshuaissac]

Those are claimed by the recipient under a programme called Gift Aid.

[ridiculous_fish]

Do I understand correctly that charities report contributions to the government, which then adjusts the taxes due from the donors? That seems like a good system.

[chrisseaton]

Right they can claim 25% but you can also claim another 20% back!

[philjohn]

We can deduct far less than you can in the Netherlands - mortgage interest for example is deductible for you, but not in the UK.

Someone on PAYE will have most of the deductibles handled by their employer (pension, any salary sacrifice schemes etc).

[teh_klev]

In the UK, deductibles on mortgage interest payments (known as MIRAS[0]) was abolished for private home owners in 2000. As a renter this kind of always stuck in my craw that homeowners got this preferential treatment and was quite glad it was abolished (even after becoming a "homeowner").

Oddly, buy-to-let landlords do retain this deductible, though HMRC have fiddled around with how this works over recent times[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_interest_relief_at_so...

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/restricting-finan...

[philjohn]

Yes, the BTL sort of makes sense though if you view the mortgage as a business expense, but BTL has had a distorting effect on the UK housing market for too long - changes are desperately needed here, but with so many Tory donors being housing firms, it's unlikely to happen.

[oarsinsync]

That's likely true because like the majority of people, you don't make enough money, or wont see enough benefit from the effort involved. Anyone earning over £100k a year is required to file a self assessment, and if you've reached that point, you also likely have a bunch of tax deductible expenses, that even if the £-value is low, you're going to include in your filing since you're doing it anyway.

[chrisseaton]

This is only true for people earning below a threshold - most professionals in the UK will need to file taxes, but accountants are very cheap here.

[onion2k]

This is only true for people earning below a threshold - most professionals in the UK will need to file taxes

That simply isn't true. An income of £80,000 puts you in the top 4% of adult earners. A salary of £100,000 is probably in the top 2 or 3%.

This was discussed extensively at the last election when Labout proposed a new tax rate for people earning over £125k https://election2019.ifs.org.uk/article/labour-s-proposed-in...

[robertlagrant]

Worth noting that if someone is a contractor they'll need to file taxes, even if they pay themselves a lower wage (and thus wouldn't show up in the high earners stats). If they're an NHS doctor/nurse who also does some private work, same. Or anyone who has more than one employer, or is in the gig economy. It's not vast swathes of people, but I think it'd be more than 2 or 3%.

[tialaramex]

No. I don't like paperwork. So, I don't do paperwork.

It can be more tax efficient to file tax paperwork, but I don't want to do paperwork, so I just had an umbrella employ me when somebody insisted on hiring me as a "contractor" and the umbrella handled the paperwork for which of course they keep a fee. As far as the government is concerned I just had two PAYE employers, the umbrella and my "real" job.

Having multiple employers also does not require filing taxes. One of the employers gets given a zero tax code and they tax all your pay at full rate, the other one gets a normal tax code which reflects your personal allowance and other considerations. My tax code was oscillating all over the place - but that's not a problem it's all automated.

If you love paperwork you can choose to do all the paperwork. Or if you love money and don't hate paperwork maybe you can save a few hundred quid by filing and I hope it makes you happy. I hate paperwork, and I have plenty of money. So, no, despite earning a lot of money and having worked as a contractor I preferred to stick with PAYE.

[robertlagrant]

I don't think you need to love paperwork or money. Just employ an accountant for a few hours a year.

[oarsinsync]

> most professionals in the UK will need to file taxes, but accountants are very cheap here

I'm guessing you're conflating professionals with contractors, as most high earning professionals I know do not need an accountant to file their taxes, as it's all just done on a self assessment, which is extremely straight forward, and there's little opportunity to game that system effectively.

Meanwhile contractors operating through Ltd entities (now may be hamstrung somewhat with IR35) absolutely should be leveraging an accountant to take advantage of the various ways to reduce their taxable earnings.

[chrisseaton]

> most high earning professionals I know do not need an accountant to file their taxes

Yes you don't need an accountant (and I didn't say that you did) but if you want one instead of doing it yourself they just about £100 rather than I don't know how many thousand that would cost you in the US.

[laurencerowe]

Likely hundreds rather than thousands through a tax preparation service (they’re not real accountants.) I just use one of the less expensive tax filing websites. It’s somewhat more complex than filing self assessment online in the U.K.

[thrwyoilarticle]

You would need to if you earned 6 figures. So copying our system for the American posters here wouldn't solve their problem.

[laurencerowe]

You can file for self assessment online through HMRC’s website. It was substantially less complex than the online tax filing website I pay in the US.

[hereforphone]

How complicated were your taxes? Did you work overseas for an extended period of time (outside of the EU)? Did you have special tax credits to claim, business profits to add, or anything else unusual? Simple taxes are relatively easy to file in America, too.

[raptor99]

That's awesome! In 2006 I did the same thing with Turbotax for free at my PC at my desk in 15 minutes. I'm sure I could have started doing it on my phone once I got a smartphone but opted not to.

[kwhitefoot]

Same in Norway, and the rest of Scandinavia I think. For most people there is nothing to do.

[snorremd]

Pretty much yeah. I guess there are some deductions which need to be filed manually as the government would have no way of knowing about them. Like if you have a really long commute to work you get to deduct a certain amount per KM from your taxes.

But mostly these days, unless you run a company, you don't really have to change much about your pre-filled tax statement. Only once have I experienced that my housing association made addendums to the yearly tax report that needed to be changed in my tax statement.

I also lost some money on micro loans last year that apparently I had to file deductions for myself, but it amounted to so little money that I just let the state keep that money.

[npteljes]

Here in Hungary I filed my taxes with the government provided Java application, on my Linux computer. No problems whatsoever.

[cscurmudgeon]

US has twenty times more people than Netherlands.

A fairer comparison would be with the tax system of a small US state or a large city in the US.

Edit: Downvoted as it goes against the narrative, lol.

[aksss]

People always gloss over the massive scale differences when comparing the US to European countries, whether it’s prisons, taxes, healthcare, etc. It’s like, show me the system operating as well with 5x the population before even joking that it should work as efficiently at 10x, much less 20x. Call me when you’re filing EU taxes as individuals in addition to your nation-state taxes.

[TheCoelacanth]

That should just make it easier to afford an automated system because you can spread out the cost across more people.

[u678u]

Its not the predatory companies that are the problem its the US tax system. If it was possible for people to "check the numbers from the government" on an app, it would happen here too.

[warricksothr]

It absolutely is a problem of predatory companies spending money on lobbying against simpler tax code. An equal share of the blame is on the politicians accepting these “legal” bribes against the interests of their constituents.

Lobbyists were supposed to be for promoting the interests of small groups that might not have the representation among a politicians constituents to warrant paying attention to. Instead we have rampant and excessive spending by corporations that lobby to keep their monopolies over segments of the market that harm American citizens.

- https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp... - https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre... - https://abcnews.go.com/Business/turbotax-lobbies-lawmakers-t...

[u678u]

> In 2016 alone, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, spent $2 million on lobbying, ProPublica reports. H&R Block spent $3 million, some of it on the same efforts.

I'm not convinced $5m a year would make such a big impact.

[jcranmer]

I strongly suspect that it's not the $5m/yr these companies are spending that's doing it; there's basically three other camps who push (directly or indirectly) for this:

* Special-interest groups whose preferential tax treatment might be threatened if there's a push to simplify the tax code (as having the government do the taxes for you kind of requires the taxes be simpler to do so).

* Ideologues who hate government spending but don't think that tax cuts count as spending.

* Anti-tax crusaders who want to make filing taxes painful so there's more grassroots support for cutting taxes. (Think Grover Norquist here).

[LanceH]

TurboTax is buying influence...who is selling? They are the problem.

[jeltz]

No, both are the problem. Look at how we solved bribes. We made it illegal both to give and to accept.

[LanceH]

The problem isn't bribery, though. It's entirely legal lobbying, made legal by the people accepting the would be bribes.

[jjoonathan]

The companies spend an enormous amount of money lobbying to ensure that this sort of thing doesn't happen, so yeah, they're culpable.

[viraptor]

Of course it's possible. The government will charge you if you filled out the forms wrong, so they have a lot available - instead they could prefill a lot of the information.

[mensetmanusman]

It is somewhat known that these companies continue to lobby to keep it complicated enough to require their services.

[systemvoltage]

With all the wrongs about Turbo Tax and monopolizing tax filing - criticisms are appropriate. That said, I much prefer the US system. The US IRS already knows what how much tax an indiviual owes just like the Dutch government. Having to manually file taxes is a feature, not a bug IMO. The only difference is that the US IRS assumes you'd want to itemize and customize your tax return by default whereas the Dutch government makes standard deductions the default. I wouldn't want the government to just send me a number of what I owe. Sure you can challenge it, but I prefer the default to be that the citizen files taxes and the government can tally up the proposed taxes against the data they have and either accept or challenge it.

However, this Turbo Tax monopoly needs to go. There should be a free (OSS) software that can file the taxes.

[mnky9800n]

In Norway the system is similar to the Netherlands. I think you are missing the part where it is mind numbingly easy to go in and add your own deductions. Also, you aren't challenging the amount you owe, you are simply adjusting it.

Having filed taxes in America and Norway, the American system is designed to make you fail and to use paid for nonsense to do something that is incredibly easy.

[laurencerowe]

I spent a year working in Norway and forgot to tell the tax authorities to give me my return in English. Made do by typing stuff into Google translate. Still took less time than filing my US taxes does now.

[koyote]

> Sure you can challenge it, but I prefer the default to be that the citizen files taxes and the government can tally up the proposed taxes against the data they have and either accept or challenge it.

But why? Both have the same outcome but one is more work and costs more as well as has a greater chance of you getting it wrong and being fined in the process.

Would you also prefer supermarkets to make you calculate the total amount you owe when you get to the cashier, making sure you applied all promotions and frequent shopper deductions manually?

[spaetzleesser]

You don’t seem to understand how things work. The government would send you a pre-filled tax return that contains everything they already know. You would check that and could then make amendments as needed. It doesn’t make sense to view it as a feature to have to put in the work to fill a tax return from scratch while the government already knows what should be there and will check it.

Like In every negotiation the advantage is on the side of the party who has the most information. The government first disclosing what they know gives you as taxpayer an advantage.

[distances]

There's no advantage though as you have to pay the same taxes in any case. It's about convenience.

[spaetzleesser]

Yes. And overall the country saves a lot of unnecessary work.

[systemvoltage]

Have you ever been to a DMV in the USA and see how dysfunction it is?

So many reasons why I don't support this. Ease of filing is one of the aspects, rather small for me.

1) USA's government is far more incompetent than Dutch

2) If US IRS sends me a prefilled tax form with erroneous income, say off by 10%, sure I can correct it and file it but now the onus of proof is on the citizen to disprove the error. You might say 'Ok, it is just prefiling it, you can always correct it' - future laws will ask for proof.

3) For a small and nimble country like Netherlands it works very well. Voicing concerns in Netherlands is direct and easy. Not here, USA would mess this up big time.

4) Ideologically, I have issues. It would be extremely orweillian and big-brotherish to get a tax bill from the government - yes I know its just 'pre-filling the boxes' but it will creep up from there.

5) I hate paying for Turbo Tax but there is no denying - it works extremely well. USA's federal system with 100% gaurantee would not be as good. We need to go open source, not put more power in the hands of the massively incompetent IRS and more generally Federal Government.

6) Local and State taxes - this would mean absolutely a patch work of systems that are supplied by shitty software companies to local and state governments. Hard pass.

7) Laws would creep up and change to not just say pre-fill the tax forms but would require massive effort from the citizen to disprove the government. If the filing process initiates from the citizen, the government has to go out on a limb to prove that it's incorrect which is how it should be.

8) I would support ease of filing taxes. But hey! We have that. It is called 1040EZ which takes no more than 10 mins for simple taxes. No software required.

9) I prefer totally offline tax filing. I use Turbo Tax but always print out the tax forms. You might think this is old fashioned but I like doing things old fashioned way. I don't want to digitize anything especially when it comes to automated shitty SaaS hired by the government, I have zero confidence.

10) Even without OSS, I just think that $79 + $____ owed taxes is the marginal rate. $79 -> goes to private industry (Turbo Tax, which does a great job) and $_____ owed to the government. I don't want tax payer money to fund a massive national 'prefiling' tax program. I would support getting rid of $79 effective flat tax that only goes to Turbo Tax.

If the only advantage is the 'pre-filling' part, then I much prefer assembling the data (W2, 1099s, etc) myself and file taxes. Period.

[spaetzleesser]

“If the only advantage is the 'pre-filling' part, then I much prefer assembling the data (W2, 1099s, etc) myself and file taxes. Period.”

Why? The government gives you all they know and you can then accept, amend or totally rewrite the return. I don’t see the downside to this.

“2) If US IRS sends me a prefilled tax form with erroneous income, say off by 10%, sure I can correct it and file it but now the onus of proof is on the citizen to disprove the error. You might say 'Ok, it is just prefiling it, you can always correct it' - future laws will ask for proof.”

The burden of proof is on you already when you write your return from scratch. It gets compared to what they know already which is the data a prefilled return would contain.

[lastofthemojito]

It's more of an oligopoly than a monopoly as you can pay TaxAct or TaxSlayer or H&R Block, etc if you don't want to pay TurboTax. The issue is that the IRS could relatively easily provide online federal tax filing as a free service but they choose not to compete with the tax prep industry.

[natex]

Not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. Seems like a rational opinion? What am I missing?

[jeltz]

That the word challange is overly dramatic plus technically incorrect (adding a deduction that the government could not possibly know of is not a challenge). In actuality you just add any missing deductions, double check the numbers and then submit. His proposed system is just busy work.

That said I did not downvote.

[systemvoltage]

I've outlined the reasons here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27908298

The problem is that I am not a tax expert and but it rings a lot of alarm bells of expansion of government power.

We're effectively bandwagoning behind Netherland's system while ignoring the massive differences between levels of government, size of population and scale, and the overall law making process.

All for a stupendous reason = Ease of filing. Filing taxes on a bus while on vacation is such a outrageously insignificant 'feature'.

[spaetzleesser]

It’s not a rational opinion. It’s based on not understanding how the process works in other countries.

[aliswe]

"disagree, lets downvote"

[e12e]

Probably? I don't really agree with gp, but up-voted, as it reads like a reasonable argument. Normally I'd probably neither up or down vote, but I generally browse with "show dead" - and it's sad to see comments down voted to oblivion when users offer an opinion that's just slightly against the consensus. Without dissenting opinions there's not much debate left. /meta

[systemvoltage]

Yup. I have come to realize that not seeing any dissenting opinions is scary and terrifying. So thanks for being charitable in this pursuit. There are a lot of ideas on HN that get no pushback and mob mentality that I want to challenge and contest. I don't think tax filing process is that bad but it is magnetizing to say "I filed my taxes while on a bus on a vacation" than to dig into the deeper implications of what that means.

To be honest, I objectively like Dutch system for simple taxes similar to 1040EZ form in USA. I philosophically and ideologically oppose it. And, furthermore, I have no faith in our government and its ability to run efficiently.

[aliswe]

Well put! Ah well, I don't believe in "karma" anyway ...

[sokoloff]

> The US IRS already knows what how much tax an indiviual owes just like the Dutch government.

Citation very much needed; that’s not true for anyone running a business (even a side business), for anyone with shares of stock purchased before Jan 1, 2011 or mutual funds before Jan 1, 2012, and many other not uncommon situations.

[unishark]

Did the parent comment about the Netherlands also apply to business owners? I have dealt with business taxes in other countries besides the US (though not Netherlands) and you absolutely are expected to hire an accountant to do it. It may well be impossible to file them otherwise. In the US for the most common businesses you can do pass-through taxation and just add a schedule to your regular return.

[sokoloff]

Even in a pass-through business that can use schedule C or E, this part is still almost always false: “IRS already knows what how much tax an [individual] owes”. They almost never have enough information to correctly and completely fill out schedule C or E for you.

[unishark]

Sure but the point was the comparison to the Dutch system, hence the "...like the Dutch government" part of that sentence. So while its great to make sure people are clear about describing tax laws here on the internets, it may not be an aspect of the argument that is relevant.

[sokoloff]

I read that sentence most plainly as having two claims: The IRS has enough information to prepare returns for US individuals. This is similar to the Dutch ability claimed above.

Rather than as “the IRS has the same limitations in individual tax return preparation as the Dutch system”.

(GP then goes on to claim that while the IRS has this ability, they are philosophically opposed to this becoming the standard method of tax preparation, which further biases me to thinking that the first reading was their intent.)

[andi999]

"I always feel like somebody's watching me

And I have no privacy (ooh ooh)

I always feel like somebody's watching me

Who's playing tricks on me?

And I don't feel safe anymore, oh, what a mess

I wonder who's watching me now (who?), the IRS?"