[tpmoney]

>Considering the penalties for getting it wrong. Simply no. You assume it is correct if it matches the data you have, not by default.

We live in a world where people routinely borrow from "tribal lending services" at 500% APR. Where they buy a car on the monthly payment value without consideration for APR or loan term. Where an entire financial crisis was caused in large part by people taking out bad loans they knew (or should have known) were impossible for them to service properly despite the consequences. Where people don't review their own pay stubs only to discover their employer has been cheating them for years or has improperly withheld taxes. And a world where despite the existence of both the 1040EZ and e-filing people still find tax paperwork confusing and too hard.

Forgive me if I don't share your optimism on whether most tax payers would assume the answer the government got was correct or not, regardless of the consequences. It's also not an unreasonable assumption either, why in the world would you want a system where you couldn't assume the result was correct most of the time?

[fn-mote]

> [...] I don't share your optimism on whether most tax payers would assume the answer the government got was correct or not [...]

Rephrasing your response, it sounds like you would say you expect most tax payers lack the ability (or interest) to compute their taxes correctly under any circumstances.

Review has nothing to do with it.

I believe that providing people the correct numbers is just going to increase compliance. They don´t want to audit anything. They want to pay what they have to pay and get on with the rest of their lives.

[tpmoney]

I can't speak for "under any circumstances" but I suspect the vast majority of tax payers already outsource their tax computations to either one of the major software vendors, one of the major tax services or their own financial institutions / private accountant. I assume this because otherwise I would not expect "IRS makes a self service portal" to be headline news or a game of politics.

Beyond that though, the thread discussion was about whether there are any mechanisms by which the government pre-filling people's taxes could '[make] "tax increases by stealth" easier'. I proposed there were, though with no claims to the degree to which that actually had real world impact on tax payers and their behavior.

If we assume as you say that people "want to pay what they have to pay and get on with the rest of their lives", then it seems reasonable to think that anything which reduces the amount of effort and thought necessary for the process also has potential to '[make] "tax increases by stealth" easier', simply by the fact that it reduces the amount of thought one needs to afford to the concept of taxes in the the first place.

The alternative would be to propose some mechanism by which the government pre-filing people's taxes would increase the degree to which they pay attention to their taxes. Or at a minimum one needs to argue that people would pay exactly as much attention as they do now and thus it would be a net-zero change in focus on taxes, but if that's the case, then any compliance increase would be a function of making it easier to be in compliance at all, which is tangental to whether or not it '[made] "tax increases by stealth" easier'