Technically it is the standard in the US as well. That’s what income tax withholding is for, and most people’s mortgages or rents bundle in property taxes as well. Then the other chunk of taxes that most people pay are sales tax and gas taxes, all paid as you earn/spend.
The real distinction is the backwards filing process. You have to fill out information on W2s and 1099s that the government already has.
I think this could be streamlined without pissing off the third party tax filing industry. Just make it so that all of the information on those forms can be provided all at once to the tax filing software companies when a person puts in their personal info. TurboTax already kind of sort of does this when you put in a couple of pieces of info from each W2 and it fetches the rest, but it could be streamlined into a standard.
Then for people who file manually, there could be a system where the government sends a consolidated group of summed values for use on the manual forms. I feel like this could be an acceptable compromise that works within our broken lobbying system.
The real distinction is the backwards filing process. You have to fill out information on W2s and 1099s that the government already has.
I think this could be streamlined without pissing off the third party tax filing industry. Just make it so that all of the information on those forms can be provided all at once to the tax filing software companies when a person puts in their personal info. TurboTax already kind of sort of does this when you put in a couple of pieces of info from each W2 and it fetches the rest, but it could be streamlined into a standard.
Then for people who file manually, there could be a system where the government sends a consolidated group of summed values for use on the manual forms. I feel like this could be an acceptable compromise that works within our broken lobbying system.