[freeopinion]

The govt should never be allowed to make tax software. They should make an easy interface for reporting taxes, but never make any tax management software. It is too huge a conflict of interest to let the same organization that complicates taxes profit from selling you software to simplify your taxes. And by profit, I don't just mean the $ price tag of the software. The parent said it should be "free". Presumably they meant free as in beer. But free as in freedom involves a lot more than that. More than "open source", too.

If you want the govt to make tax management simple, have them simplify the tax code.

Let's look at an example: sales tax. How many people do you know that have software for managing their sales taxes? They track how much they spent on food vs medical supplies etc.? They track that spending across all the different merchants, and across different tax districts so they can prove that their aggregated spending crossed a certain threshold to qualify for a different tax bracket. They quantify how much was for the local charitable food drive so they can take deductions.

No, wait. Nobody does any of that. They just walk up to the checkout stand and pay for their purchases. Now, merchants on the other hand, do have to manage sales tax. They might need simple software for that. It should not come from the government.

[triceratops]

> Presumably they meant free as in beer. But free as in freedom involves a lot more than that

What does it involve?

The government already has a computeTax implementation that they use to verify that your return is correct. We're just asking them to give everyone else access to it. Not really sure what freedoms are harmed.

[freeopinion]

That's kind of my point. Why do we need to file a tax return at all if the government already knows everything? Why should we ever get a return? Did you ever get a sales tax return?

[triceratops]

> Why do we need to file a tax return at all if the government already knows everything?

Most people wouldn't need to, because the government knows most tax-relevant information about most people at tax time. But it doesn't know everything about everyone. So it seems you're driving at

> If you want the govt to make tax management simple, have them simplify the tax code.

Presumably you mean get rid of all the different types of deductions and credits that can affect your taxes and only become known to the government at tax time.

That's easy to say, but really hard to do. Close to impossible. Rewrites of codebases are generally a bad idea. The tax code is also a codebase (more of a specification, but whatever). Only it's a codebase written by politicians and their staff and lobbyists. Imagine how much time you spend at work arguing about stupid shit, and everyone involved is technical. Now imagine the same discussion with non-technical people and voters and TV ads.

> Why should we ever get a return? Did you ever get a sales tax return?

It's called a refund. A return is the paperwork you file.