Part of the author's problem is that he's in Germany: a country in love with paper trails. You can't change your phone plan without writing a letter of request

Part of the author's problem is that he's in Germany: a country in love with paper trails. You can't change your phone plan without writing a letter of request (not joking). Taxes require a level of documentation that in North America is only needed for an audit. No joke, MT personal and business tax return is a thick binder full of paper every year. The only solution is to pay a tax lawyer to prepare it for you. Yes, there's a whole field of law that's just for filling out tax forms. And it's an enormous industry here. Incidentally, the complexity is maintained by the tax lawyer lobby. There have been a few proposals to simplify the tax code, but it's hard to do when a third of the civil service and the single largest legal profession in the country oppose the idea.