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by toomuchtodo 1024 days ago
All of this can be provided to the IRS through a crud interface in your IRS account and it’s entirely desirable to make paying taxes as easy and cost efficient as possible.

Automate what can be automated, make what cannot straightforward.
2 comments
twoodfin 1024 days ago
The claim was:

For most tax payers in the US, the government has all of the necessary information to calculate tax liability through W-2, 1099, and other filings from third parties.

They do not. And I think most Americans would recoil at the idea of giving them what they would need to compute liability under the bulk of current law.

So we’re really talking about a “public option” for tax filing software. The Treasury Department is giving it a try, we’ll see how it goes.

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toomuchtodo 1024 days ago
My comment was specifically to rebut this weak claim you put forth:

> We could have IRS forms and the IRS maintaining an expansive database to cover all tax-relevant events and amounts, but that hardly seems desirable.

If it’s tax relevant, why would they not be collecting and then storing a record of it for the relevant period of time? That is their responsibility: to store, process, and maintain this tax-relevant information in order to compute taxes or refunds due.

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twoodfin 1024 days ago
Again, look at the EITC eligibility. It includes information like which partner is supplying more than 50% of the support in a household. Primary residence qualification has a similar requirement. The IRS does not track anyone’s primary residence from year-to-year without the taxpayer telling them, and doesn’t assume they know. This is a good thing.
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toomuchtodo 1024 days ago
But they could, trivially, using homestead exemption public record data wrt primary residence. EITC can be an attestation online. I prefer systems that prevent tax fraud. If you want to prevent institutional overreach, that’s a governance issue, not “better they just can’t find the fraud.”
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makapuf 1024 days ago
In France you have a basic way of pre declaring such things, then your "simple" money sources are pre declared (salary, dividends and interests, also public interest donations you did) then the situation is carried over unless you go and change it. You often mostly just have to look that everything seems alright (it generally is) and click OK.
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