[twoodfin]

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.

[toomuchtodo]

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.

[twoodfin]

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.

[toomuchtodo]

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.”